Client: Urban Prototyping Festival

Overview

URBAN_Parasol is a modular series of shelter-shade structures assembled from a combination of open-source design 3D-printed joints and ready-made objects installed in the streets of SoMa in San Francisco as part of the Urban Protyping Festival organized by GAFFTA.

Goals

It was integral to this commission to be able to integrate the art piece [URBAN Parasol] into a responsive installation that could reactivate the corner in which it was installed. The corner of Natoma and Minna St. in SoMA [South of Market Street] neighborhood in San Francisco. This corner is charcterized by being normally cold and inhospitable, and a place people normally avoid. We worked hard to make this structure able and willing to respond to changing weather conditions, to sun movements and the movements of people around it.
In order to achieve this we designed the shape of the Parasol in a site specific manner, the shape and angles of it were designed in order to achieve optimal movement and interaction between pedestrians and the installation.

Process

The Urban Parasol was a collaboration between artists, architects, mechanical, electrical, structural and robotics engineers as well as urban planners and art curators from GAFFTA.

Additional Information

This project just won a Living Labs Global Award [LLGA 2013] in May 2013 from the city of Paris as a solution for comfortable outdoor seating for the cafe terraces located around the city.