Tag Archives: Installations

What If City Monuments Generated Power Instead of Just Looking Good?

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Public art has long served as a cultural mirror, reflecting what a society chooses to honor. As climate change intensifies and cities face mounting pressure to decarbonize, questions about what our monuments should stand for are getting harder to ignore. Most renewable energy infrastructure stays invisible, buried in utility corridors or mounted on rooftops, rarely acknowledged as something worth celebrating in public spaces.

Santa Fe-based artist Michael Jantzen has spent years addressing exactly that through his Public Eco-Art Proposals. The series imagines a different kind of monument, one that doesn’t merely symbolize sustainability but actively practices it. Each proposal takes the form of a sculpture or pavilion that generates electricity from the sun or wind, collects rainwater, stores energy in batteries, and sometimes sends power into the local grid.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

Jantzen gives his work an aesthetic freedom that most utility-driven designs don’t have. Rather than concealing the mechanics, he treats solar panels, wind turbines, and structural frameworks as sculptural elements in their own right. The visual language is deliberately technological and mechanical, blurring the line between a functional energy structure and art worth stopping for.

Walk through one of these proposed spaces, and you might find yourself beneath a pavilion whose curved solar canopy quietly feeds electricity back to the neighborhood. Or stop to look at a series of angular sculptures lined up across a park, their solar-panel tops tracking the light. What looks like a meditation on shape and form turns out to be a modest power station doing actual work.

The proposals span a wide range of environments. Some are designed for open fields or public parks, while others imagine coastal settings with floating platforms supporting wind and water energy structures. A chevron-shaped sculpture with a solar panel at its angular peak stands in what appears to be a university courtyard. Another piece holds solar panels above cylindrical battery storage pods, blending the practical business of energy collection with an unexpectedly considered form.

This approach also reframes the relationship between art and urban infrastructure. Municipalities already commission sculptures for parks and plazas; so why shouldn’t those commissions do more? A solar-powered gathering space generates electricity, makes clean technology approachable, and sparks conversations among the millions of people who walk through it, most of whom would otherwise never engage with energy infrastructure at all.

Jantzen’s vision extends beyond any single installation. He imagines these structures placed in cities and parks worldwide, shifting how communities relate to the energy they consume by making that relationship visible and beautiful. For him, celebrating sustainability means building things worth caring about, giving clean energy a presence that people can gather around, the way they’ve always done with the landmarks that define a place.

The post What If City Monuments Generated Power Instead of Just Looking Good? first appeared on Yanko Design.

Burning Man 2026 Built a 300-Ring Light Tower You Have to Earn

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One person shouting into an empty desert doesn’t build much of anything. But what happens when thousands of voices gather around a 12-meter tower made of 300 programmable rings of light, and the structure itself begins to respond? That’s the premise behind Axis Mundi: Resonant Spire, Sergei Konchekov’s installation selected for the 2026 Burning Man Honoraria program, and it might be the most genuinely interesting piece of architecture to emerge this year. Not because it’s the biggest or the most technically complex, but because it actually has something to say.

The concept is both technically precise and philosophically loaded. Konchekov built the tower to translate human voice into a vertical system of light and sound. Speak toward it, and the rings light up. Walk away, and the activation fades. The structure doesn’t generate its own spectacle. It borrows yours. Which sounds like a gimmick when you type it out flat like that, but when you sit with it, it starts to feel like one of those rare design ideas that actually earns its concept.

Designer: Sergei Konchekov

What makes it more than just an interactive light show is the accumulation logic built into its architecture. The 300 rings function as a kind of vertical archive. Lower rings hold stabilized states built up over time, while the upper rings stay live and reactive to current input. So the tower, in a real and structural sense, carries memory. What a crowd did an hour ago is still visible at the base, while what’s happening right now lives near the top. Light doesn’t disappear here. It accumulates. Time, quite literally, becomes physical form.

Konchekov developed the project through a methodology he calls COLLIZIUM, which frames architectural form through conflict-based computational processes and collective social input. That might sound like a design school thesis, but the output is something more immediate and tactile than the language around it suggests. The architecture doesn’t exist independently of its participants. It is generated through them. Without the crowd, there is no form. Burning Man’s own listings describe it as “neither monument nor machine, but a living signal,” and that description genuinely holds.

The broader conversation Konchekov is entering with this work feels particularly timely. Digital communication is at an all-time volume and an all-time low for meaning. We post, we broadcast, we react, and somehow the cumulative noise produces very little that resembles actual connection. Resonant Spire offers a different model: collective input that actually converges, that creates something legible and shared and visible. A crowd becomes a coherent structure only because they showed up together. That is not a small idea dressed in a large installation.

It’s also worth noting that Burning Man is arguably the right venue for this, not just for the obvious reasons of scale and spectacle, but because the event itself is predicated on temporary community. The playa is a place where the usual rules about permanence and individual credit get set aside. A tower that only works when people gather around it and offer their voices is not a metaphor at Burning Man. It’s just a description of what’s happening there already. Konchekov is, in some ways, building architecture that matches the culture it inhabits.

The visual language of the spire draws from ancient and spiritual references, the axis mundi being a cosmological concept found across many cultures, a central pillar connecting earth and sky. Konchekov takes that idea and routes it through a live data feed. The cone-stacked structure rises with phased waves of light traveling upward, in the project’s own words, “like a visible breath.” It is striking, undeniably, but the aesthetic isn’t really the point. The refusal to be passive is. Most architecture asks you to look at it. This one asks you to mean something together before it shows you what you’ve made.

The post Burning Man 2026 Built a 300-Ring Light Tower You Have to Earn first appeared on Yanko Design.

Bang & Olufsen Just Taught Stone to Sing at Milan 2026

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Every year, Milan Design Week raises the question of what design is actually for. Not in the abstract, philosophical sense that gets debated in panel discussions nobody remembers, but in the most immediate, physical way: you walk into a space, and either you feel it or you don’t. The Bang & Olufsen and Antolini installation this year, From Quarry to Garden: The Shape of Beautiful Sound, is the kind of experience that makes you feel it before you can even explain why.

The collaboration between Bang & Olufsen, the Danish audio luxury brand founded in 1925, and Antolini, the Verona-based natural stone company with 70 years of history, is one of those pairings that sounds unlikely on paper but makes complete sense once you see it. Both brands are obsessed with material. Both are deeply committed to the idea that an object should not only perform but move you. Putting them in the same room, or rather the same garden, was probably inevitable.

Designers: Antolini® with Bang & Olufsen

The installation, hosted at Antolini’s MilanoDuomo Stoneroom, centers on the preview of Beosound Haven, Bang & Olufsen’s forthcoming landscape speaker. It’s a sphere of precision-engineered aluminium that sits on a stone plinth, surrounded by living greenery, water lilies floating on a reflective table, and the kind of deliberate quiet that makes you lean in. Droplets fall onto the water surface and send out ripples, which is either a very beautiful metaphor for sound or just a very beautiful moment. I’m not sure it matters which.

The primary stone throughout the space is Antolini’s Taj Mahal quartzite in a matt finish, chosen for its soft, almost luminous tonality. It reads as both ancient and contemporary at once, exactly the kind of visual tension that great design installations live on. The stone doesn’t compete with the speaker; it contextualizes it. Beosound Haven looks like it belongs there, among the moss and the hydrangeas, in a way that speakers almost never manage to look like they belong anywhere outdoors.

That, to me, is the most interesting design question this collaboration raises: can sound be architectural? Not metaphorically, but literally, the way a wall or a window or a threshold is architectural? Bang & Olufsen’s Senior Director of Design, Kresten Bjørn Krab-Bjerre, speaks about sound as “an architectural language,” one that interacts with materials and forms atmosphere. It’s the kind of language that’s usually associated with interiors, with rooms and ceilings and acoustic panels. Translating it outdoors, into the open air, into a garden or a terrace, is a genuinely new proposition. And one worth taking seriously.

The collaboration also extends to a limited series of Beolab 18 speakers reinterpreted in Antolini stones: Amazonite, Retro Black Petrified Wood, Patagonia Original, Dalmata, Cipollino GreyWave, and Taj Mahal, each piece defined by the specific character of its material. No two are identical, which is exactly how it should be when you’re working with stone. Stone isn’t uniform and it was never meant to be. That unpredictability is part of the point.

This is the second chapter of the Bang & Olufsen and Antolini partnership, building on work introduced in 2025. It feels more confident this time around, more willing to make a statement. Carlo Alberto Antolini describes the result as “a dialogue between the elements,” and that framing feels right. It’s not a speaker placed in a garden. It’s a conversation between nature and craft, between sound and surface, between something ancient and something very, very deliberate.

Milan Design Week produces a lot of installations that photograph well and feel thin in person. This one seems to work differently, designed to be experienced with the body, not just processed with the eyes. The sound moves through the space. The stone holds light. The water catches everything. Whether you’re drawn in by the audio, the aesthetics, or simply the spectacle of a garden growing inside a Milan stoneroom, you’re likely to leave thinking about what it means to really listen to a space rather than just look at it.

The post Bang & Olufsen Just Taught Stone to Sing at Milan 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Skoda’s Inflatable Car Installation at Milan Design Week Looks Like a Bouncy Castle Grew Wheels

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Cars belong to the world of hard surfaces, precision tolerances, and engineering constraints measured in fractions of millimeters. Ulises Studio works in the opposite direction. The Barcelona-based spatial design practice has spent years creating immersive environments that transform architecture into something tactile and experiential, turning rigid spaces into soft, inviting landscapes. Their installations have activated cultural venues and public spaces across Europe, and their approach is immediately recognizable: inflatable forms, vibrant color palettes, and a commitment to making people rethink how they interact with the built environment. When Skoda asked them to collaborate on an installation for Milan Design Week 2025, they brought that same philosophy to something designers rarely get to touch: an actual production car.

The Epiq, Skoda’s new electric SUV, became the canvas. Ulises Studio covered it entirely in inflatable fabric panels, each one a horizontal tube running across the body in a sequence of cheerful colors. Mint green, burnt orange, soft pink, butter yellow, pale turquoise. The effect is disarming. What should feel like a parked vehicle instead reads as a sculpture, a comment on automotive design language filtered through the lens of spatial intervention. Skoda staged it at Palazzo Senato with multiple Epiq vehicles, each wrapped in different inflatable treatments, creating a dialog between the engineered reality and Ulises Studio’s playful reinterpretation.

Designers: Ulises Studio & Skoda Design

The genius of the installation lies in how completely it transforms the car’s character without altering its underlying form. Every crease, every character line, every panel gap gets translated into soft, pillowy geometry. The horizontal tubes follow the Epiq’s actual contours, which means the inflatable version retains the proportions and stance of the real thing. You can still read it as a compact SUV, but now it feels approachable in a way sheet metal never could. The tactile quality is impossible to ignore. Your brain knows you’re looking at air-filled fabric wrapped around a vehicle, but your hands want to reach out and squeeze it anyway.

Ulises Studio didn’t stop at wrapping cars. They transformed the entire courtyard at Palazzo Senato into what they’re calling a “clay landscape,” an inflatable environment that extends the material language across the entire space. Oversized typography spelling out “Ooooh, that’s EpiQ” dominates one wall, each letter constructed from the same air-filled tubes. Smaller inflatable elements populate the courtyard like sculptural furniture, creating zones where visitors can pause and take in the installation from different angles. The floor itself gets treated to a matching mint-green surface that ties the whole environment together. This is spatial design at its most comprehensive, where every element reinforces the central idea.

What makes the collaboration work is that Ulises Studio treats the Epiq as part of a larger environmental narrative rather than the hero object that everything else orbits around. The cars are embedded in the landscape, surrounded by inflatable forms that share their material language and color palette. This creates a sense of cohesion that most automotive installations never achieve, where the vehicle feels like it genuinely belongs in the space rather than being awkwardly dropped into it. The studio’s background in creating immersive experiences shows in how they choreograph movement through the courtyard, using the placement of vehicles and sculptural elements to guide visitors through different zones of the installation. You don’t just look at the inflatable Epiq, you move around it, through the landscape it inhabits, encountering different perspectives and color relationships as you navigate the space.

Ulises Studio has always understood that spatial design is a form of storytelling. Their inflatable installations communicate ideas about accessibility, transformation, and how we experience objects in space. The Epiq installation applies that same thinking to automotive design. By swapping metal and glass for inflatable fabric, they strip away the aggression and seriousness that define most car launches and replace it with something genuinely delightful. The oversized inflatable typography spelling out “Ooooh, that’s EpiQ” reinforces the tone in a fairly Gen-Z coded way, allowing the brand to resonate with younger generations. This is design as spatial play, a reminder that objects can be functional and joyful simultaneously.

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The post Skoda’s Inflatable Car Installation at Milan Design Week Looks Like a Bouncy Castle Grew Wheels first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Inflatable Ocean That Knows When You’ve Gone Too Far

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Not every design earns its attention. SHUOKE’s Light Me UP! is exactly the kind of work that makes you stop, look twice, and genuinely want to understand what you’re standing inside. And you are standing inside it. That’s the first thing to understand. Light Me UP! is not a sculpture you circle or a screen you observe from a polite distance. It is an enterable artificial seascape, a field of large inflatable forms installed at Xintiandi Style II in Shanghai, built at a scale that makes you feel genuinely small.

The columns are rounded and organic, their silhouettes somewhere between coral, sea anemone, and something you might find drifting in deep water. Their gradient coloring moves from deep orange and red at the crown down through warm yellow, then into a pale, almost translucent white at the base, where internal lights pool in cool blues and purples. During the day, they read as bold and almost playful. At night, they glow like living things. That quality, the sense that the installation is alive, is not accidental. It is the entire point.

Designer: Shuoke

Each form carries internal lighting that shifts in a breathing rhythm, expanding and contracting with a pulse that is slow enough to feel biological. The effect is subtle but deeply convincing. You stop noticing the material and start noticing the breath. When you touch one of the columns, or press through the narrow gaps between them, the light responds. The moment of contact produces a shimmer, a flicker of acknowledgment, that genuinely reads as reciprocal. SHUOKE described an earlier version of this logic as wanting the experience to feel more like interacting with a living thing than with a device, and Light Me UP! lands exactly there.

But here is where the design gets genuinely interesting, and where SHUOKE moves well beyond the usual boundaries of interactive installation work. The responsiveness has a limit, and that limit is intentional. Moderate interaction, a gentle touch, a slow movement through the space, draws the light out and activates the installation’s vitality. But push too hard, too aggressively, too much, and the light begins to fade. The structures appear to deteriorate. The environment dims and falls into stillness. The installation does not simply reward participation. It responds to the quality of it.

This is the marine ecology metaphor embedded directly into the interactive logic, and it is a clever and meaningful piece of design thinking. The ocean, like Light Me UP!, sustains and nurtures life up to a point. Past that point, it retreats. It diminishes. What SHUOKE has done is translate a genuinely complex environmental idea into a physical, embodied experience that anyone can feel without needing it explained. You don’t read the metaphor. You live it, in the span of a few minutes, with your hands and your body in a public space in Shanghai.

I think this matters more than it might initially seem. Environmental messaging in design has a tendency to stay on the surface: a recycled material here, a sustainability claim there. Light Me UP! goes somewhere different. It puts you in the position of the human who has the capacity to either nurture or exhaust the thing in front of them, and it gives you real-time feedback on which one you’re doing. That is a far more honest and demanding kind of design.

The forms themselves deserve more credit too. SHUOKE chose inflatable structures for a reason. They are soft, yielding, and slightly unpredictable. They move when pressed. They hold air the way living organisms hold breath. The choice of material reinforces the biological quality of the whole installation without ever having to announce it. The colors, warm and gradient and unmistakably aquatic at night, do the same work quietly.

Light Me UP! is the kind of design that operates on multiple registers at once: visually arresting from the street, physically immersive once you’re inside it, and conceptually coherent in a way that holds up the more you think about it. That combination is rarer than it should be, and when it shows up, it’s worth paying attention to.

The post The Inflatable Ocean That Knows When You’ve Gone Too Far first appeared on Yanko Design.

Sabine Marcelis Built Coachella’s Best Spot Out of Thin Air

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Every April, Coachella does that thing where it reminds you it’s not just a music festival. It’s a full-sensory exercise in spectacle, one that has always treated its art program with just as much ambition as its headliner lineup. This year, Dutch designer Sabine Marcelis is the one making that case loudest, with an installation called Maze that has, by most accounts, become one of the most talked-about spots on the entire festival grounds.

Maze is exactly what it sounds like, and also nothing like what you’d expect. Built from curved, inflated PVC walls that rise at varying heights, the structure winds across the Coachella grounds as a walkable labyrinth, one that feels less like an obstacle course and more like stepping into a fever dream of color and calm. The walls shift in a gradient from pale yellow at the outer edges to a deep, saturated red at the core, mimicking the warm, layered tones of a desert sunset. It’s the kind of color palette that looks deliberately, almost suspiciously perfect, and yet it doesn’t feel forced. It feels inevitable.

Designer: Sabine Marcelis

That’s what Marcelis does. The Rotterdam-based designer has built a body of work around the idea that light and material don’t just coexist. They perform together. Her practice leans into pure geometric forms and refined material investigations, always pushing manufacturing processes toward something surprising and sensory. At Coachella, that philosophy scales up beautifully. What could have been a gimmicky, oversized balloon art moment instead reads as something genuinely thoughtful: a structure designed to slow people down in a place that rarely stops moving.

And that’s the part that gets me. Coachella is famously relentless. Stages overlap, schedules are brutal, and the heat does not negotiate. Maze was built with that reality in mind. The inflated walls create shaded pockets, filtering both light and sound from the surrounding chaos. Seating runs along the outer edges, giving visitors actual places to stop and breathe. Clearings open up toward the stages, framing views of performances from inside the structure, so you never entirely lose the festival. You just get to experience it at a different speed.

Inspired by the natural contours of the Coachella Valley, the design has a landscape quality to it that reads as more than an aesthetic reference. The curved forms echo the rolling terrain of the desert, and the color gradient mirrors the sky at the specific hours when the California desert looks like it was art-directed by someone very talented. Marcelis didn’t try to compete with the landscape. She translated it. At night, the whole thing transforms. The PVC walls glow from within, turning the maze into an illuminated field of warm color that sits somewhere between architectural installation and light sculpture. If the daytime version is about refuge, the nighttime version is pure atmosphere. It hits differently against the dark, and I mean that in the best way.

I’ll be honest. I’ve watched the Coachella art program grow more ambitious over the years, and my reaction to any given installation tends to hover somewhere between “impressive” and “Instagram bait.” Maze clears that bar and then some. It works because it has an actual point of view. Marcelis built something that functions, that shelters, that engages the senses, and that happens to be visually stunning. That’s a harder balance to strike than it looks.

The installation was curated by Public Art Company, and it’s part of a broader 2026 art program that continues to push Coachella’s visual ambitions. But Maze stands out not because it’s the biggest or the flashiest. It stands out because it treats the people walking through it as the point, not the backdrop. That’s good design. And at a festival where you’re constantly being asked to witness things, it’s genuinely refreshing to walk into something that simply asks you to sit down and stay a while.

The post Sabine Marcelis Built Coachella’s Best Spot Out of Thin Air first appeared on Yanko Design.

Sabine Marcelis Built Coachella’s Best Spot Out of Thin Air

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Every April, Coachella does that thing where it reminds you it’s not just a music festival. It’s a full-sensory exercise in spectacle, one that has always treated its art program with just as much ambition as its headliner lineup. This year, Dutch designer Sabine Marcelis is the one making that case loudest, with an installation called Maze that has, by most accounts, become one of the most talked-about spots on the entire festival grounds.

Maze is exactly what it sounds like, and also nothing like what you’d expect. Built from curved, inflated PVC walls that rise at varying heights, the structure winds across the Coachella grounds as a walkable labyrinth, one that feels less like an obstacle course and more like stepping into a fever dream of color and calm. The walls shift in a gradient from pale yellow at the outer edges to a deep, saturated red at the core, mimicking the warm, layered tones of a desert sunset. It’s the kind of color palette that looks deliberately, almost suspiciously perfect, and yet it doesn’t feel forced. It feels inevitable.

Designer: Sabine Marcelis

That’s what Marcelis does. The Rotterdam-based designer has built a body of work around the idea that light and material don’t just coexist. They perform together. Her practice leans into pure geometric forms and refined material investigations, always pushing manufacturing processes toward something surprising and sensory. At Coachella, that philosophy scales up beautifully. What could have been a gimmicky, oversized balloon art moment instead reads as something genuinely thoughtful: a structure designed to slow people down in a place that rarely stops moving.

And that’s the part that gets me. Coachella is famously relentless. Stages overlap, schedules are brutal, and the heat does not negotiate. Maze was built with that reality in mind. The inflated walls create shaded pockets, filtering both light and sound from the surrounding chaos. Seating runs along the outer edges, giving visitors actual places to stop and breathe. Clearings open up toward the stages, framing views of performances from inside the structure, so you never entirely lose the festival. You just get to experience it at a different speed.

Inspired by the natural contours of the Coachella Valley, the design has a landscape quality to it that reads as more than an aesthetic reference. The curved forms echo the rolling terrain of the desert, and the color gradient mirrors the sky at the specific hours when the California desert looks like it was art-directed by someone very talented. Marcelis didn’t try to compete with the landscape. She translated it. At night, the whole thing transforms. The PVC walls glow from within, turning the maze into an illuminated field of warm color that sits somewhere between architectural installation and light sculpture. If the daytime version is about refuge, the nighttime version is pure atmosphere. It hits differently against the dark, and I mean that in the best way.

I’ll be honest. I’ve watched the Coachella art program grow more ambitious over the years, and my reaction to any given installation tends to hover somewhere between “impressive” and “Instagram bait.” Maze clears that bar and then some. It works because it has an actual point of view. Marcelis built something that functions, that shelters, that engages the senses, and that happens to be visually stunning. That’s a harder balance to strike than it looks.

The installation was curated by Public Art Company, and it’s part of a broader 2026 art program that continues to push Coachella’s visual ambitions. But Maze stands out not because it’s the biggest or the flashiest. It stands out because it treats the people walking through it as the point, not the backdrop. That’s good design. And at a festival where you’re constantly being asked to witness things, it’s genuinely refreshing to walk into something that simply asks you to sit down and stay a while.

The post Sabine Marcelis Built Coachella’s Best Spot Out of Thin Air first appeared on Yanko Design.

Disney and NatGeo Built Billboards That Bees Can Actually Live In

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Most billboards are built to be noticed and then forgotten. You see them, you process whatever they’re selling, and then they fade into the visual noise of the street. So when a campaign comes along that flips that formula entirely, it genuinely stops you in your tracks.

That’s exactly what’s happening in Manchester right now, where Disney and National Geographic, working with creative agency Meanwhile, have installed a series of billboards designed to do more than advertise. The structures, which the team calls “bloomboards,” are fitted with built-in cavities, textured surfaces, and planting elements that turn them into functioning habitats for bees. Not a two-week stunt. Not a PR photo op. Permanent installations, built from sustainably sourced cedar that had already been felled, placed across parks and public spaces throughout the city.

Designer: Meanwhile for Disney and National Geographic

The campaign ties to the launch of National Geographic’s Secrets of the Bees, a documentary series presented by explorer Bertie Gregory and executive produced by James Cameron. The series was filmed over several years using specialized cameras to capture bee behavior at a level of detail most of us have never seen. Entomologist Dr. Samuel Ramsey provided scientific input throughout. It’s streaming now on Disney+ and Hulu, and from a content standpoint alone, it sounds like essential viewing.

But the billboard work is where this becomes interesting as a piece of design thinking, not just marketing. Rather than placing a nature image on a billboard and calling it Earth Month, Meanwhile built the message into the medium. The physical structure becomes an argument for the cause. The billboard doesn’t just tell you bees matter; it gives them somewhere to live. Mini bee hotels have also been placed at several locations across Manchester, including Chorlton Water Park, Wythenshawe Park, Fletcher Moss Botanical Garden, and the Northern Quarter. Like the bloomboards, these aren’t decorative gestures. They’re functional, permanent additions to the urban landscape, and that distinction matters when the campaign is rooted in conservation.

Rachel Miles, creative director at Meanwhile, put it simply: “Our ambition is to encourage people to plant their own mix of shrubs and perennials to support bee populations and create a positive impact.” Michael Tsim, also a creative director at the agency, was just as direct: “Not just a two week campaign, but something they actually benefit from, permanently.”

That word, permanently, is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Environmental advertising has a long history of looking good while changing nothing. Companies run campaigns during Earth Month and then quietly move on. What makes this campaign feel different is that the outcomes are baked into the design itself. The bees don’t need to watch the documentary to benefit. The habitat exists regardless of whether anyone scans a QR code or downloads an app.

It also speaks to a broader shift in how thoughtful brands are approaching cause-driven work. The bar for audiences has risen sharply. People can spot the difference between a brand that has added a green ribbon to its logo and one that has committed real resources to a problem. Embedding a working habitat into an advertising structure is a tangible commitment, and one you can’t undo when April ends.

For anyone who follows design, this campaign is a reminder that the best work often finds its power in constraints. A billboard is a flat surface with a job to do. Meanwhile used that constraint not as a limitation but as a starting point, and the result is something genuinely unusual. Form serves function, function serves form, and both serve something beyond the campaign itself. Whether or not you plan to watch Secrets of the Bees (though I’d argue you should), the billboard project stands on its own as a piece of design worth paying attention to. It’s an example of what happens when a brief asks for more than attention and a creative team decides to take that seriously.

The post Disney and NatGeo Built Billboards That Bees Can Actually Live In first appeared on Yanko Design.

These Steel Chairs Are Too Big to Sit In: Walk Through Them Instead

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Most public art earns its place on a pedestal and stays there. It asks you to look, maybe photograph it, and walk away. The relationship between viewer and work rarely extends beyond that brief transaction. That’s been the convention for a long time, but there’s a growing push for installations that don’t just occupy public space but actually do something within it.

Michael Jantzen has been exploring that tension for years. His Moving Furniture series applies a simple idea to ordinary chairs and tables: take each object’s form and repeat it in progressive intervals as if capturing it mid-movement, then connect those moments into a single piece. The result is something you can still sit in or set a drink on, even if it no longer looks quite built for that.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

Monumental Moving Furniture takes that same concept into architectural territory. Built from painted steel, the series consists of abstracted chair and table forms, each generated by moving the original object through space and time and locking its path into a chain of connected segments. At this scale, what started as a reference to everyday objects feels closer to a building than a piece of furniture.

The method behind each piece is consistent. A chair or table is set in motion through space and time, with each interval frozen and joined to the next. Some pieces move only part of the original form; others shift the whole thing. The result is a structure that stops belonging to any single discipline and starts reading as furniture, sculpture, and architecture at once.

Despite being too large to sit in, these sculptures aren’t purely decorative. Each is large enough to walk under and through, giving it a practical function as a pavilion and shelter. That’s not something most public art can claim. Instead of asking people to observe from a polite distance, these structures pull you in, turning a passive encounter into something more physical and immediate.

The series covers both chair forms and table forms, each treated with the same sequential abstraction. Individual pieces have also been grouped into configurations that suggest more complex structures, as if each were a building block for something larger. Painted in vivid, solid colors like white, orange, and yellow, each structure commands attention from a distance and rewards a closer look once you’re standing beneath it.

Public spaces deserve more than objects to look at. They deserve things to experience. Monumental Moving Furniture earns its place on both counts, offering structures large enough to shelter visitors while giving them something genuinely puzzling to engage with. These forms don’t demand reverence. They invite curiosity, exploration, and the kind of slow, circling attention that good public space has always been designed to encourage.

The post These Steel Chairs Are Too Big to Sit In: Walk Through Them Instead first appeared on Yanko Design.

These Steel Chairs Are Too Big to Sit In: Walk Through Them Instead

Posted on by

Most public art earns its place on a pedestal and stays there. It asks you to look, maybe photograph it, and walk away. The relationship between viewer and work rarely extends beyond that brief transaction. That’s been the convention for a long time, but there’s a growing push for installations that don’t just occupy public space but actually do something within it.

Michael Jantzen has been exploring that tension for years. His Moving Furniture series applies a simple idea to ordinary chairs and tables: take each object’s form and repeat it in progressive intervals as if capturing it mid-movement, then connect those moments into a single piece. The result is something you can still sit in or set a drink on, even if it no longer looks quite built for that.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

Monumental Moving Furniture takes that same concept into architectural territory. Built from painted steel, the series consists of abstracted chair and table forms, each generated by moving the original object through space and time and locking its path into a chain of connected segments. At this scale, what started as a reference to everyday objects feels closer to a building than a piece of furniture.

The method behind each piece is consistent. A chair or table is set in motion through space and time, with each interval frozen and joined to the next. Some pieces move only part of the original form; others shift the whole thing. The result is a structure that stops belonging to any single discipline and starts reading as furniture, sculpture, and architecture at once.

Despite being too large to sit in, these sculptures aren’t purely decorative. Each is large enough to walk under and through, giving it a practical function as a pavilion and shelter. That’s not something most public art can claim. Instead of asking people to observe from a polite distance, these structures pull you in, turning a passive encounter into something more physical and immediate.

The series covers both chair forms and table forms, each treated with the same sequential abstraction. Individual pieces have also been grouped into configurations that suggest more complex structures, as if each were a building block for something larger. Painted in vivid, solid colors like white, orange, and yellow, each structure commands attention from a distance and rewards a closer look once you’re standing beneath it.

Public spaces deserve more than objects to look at. They deserve things to experience. Monumental Moving Furniture earns its place on both counts, offering structures large enough to shelter visitors while giving them something genuinely puzzling to engage with. These forms don’t demand reverence. They invite curiosity, exploration, and the kind of slow, circling attention that good public space has always been designed to encourage.

The post These Steel Chairs Are Too Big to Sit In: Walk Through Them Instead first appeared on Yanko Design.