Tag Archives: Michael-Jantzen

Art-ware Is the Dining Set That Never Has to Go in a Cabinet

Posted on by

Tableware has always had a storage problem. A complete set of cups, bowls, and cutlery takes up a cabinet’s worth of space for the privilege of being used a few times a week. The rest of the time, it sits behind closed doors, out of sight and contributing nothing to the space around it. That’s a lot of material devoted to a fairly passive existence.

Michael Jantzen’s Art-ware prototype takes a different approach to the same set of objects. Rather than designing tableware that gets put away after a meal, he designed a system where the dishes, cups, and cutlery connect to each other and become something else entirely: freestanding abstract sculptures that live out in the open, doubling as décor when they’re not being used for eating and drinking.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

The key to the whole system is a set of male and female connectors molded directly into each piece. These are simple protrusions that stick out from the surfaces of the bowls, cups, and cutlery handles, allowing any component to plug into or stack onto any other. A bowl can lock onto a cup, a cup onto another cup, cutlery can stand upright in an opening or connect through a handle, and the whole assembly stays together without any separate hardware.

The configurations that result don’t look accidental. Cups stacked and plugged together form vertical columns; bowls assembled at various orientations create clusters that read as organic, almost biomorphic forms. Slide cutlery upright through the assembled pieces, and the resulting structure starts to resemble a piece of abstract art you’d find mounted in a gallery, not something you’d normally find next to a kitchen sink.

That’s precisely what Jantzen is after. The Art-ware set doesn’t need to be stored in a cabinet because the assembled form is meant to sit on a shelf or table as a decorative object, a sculpture that also happens to be a dining set. You pull it apart before a meal and reassemble it afterward in whatever configuration suits you that day. No two arrangements have to be the same.

The material is recyclable plastic, and Jantzen frames the concept in straightforward sustainability terms: one product that performs multiple functions uses fewer resources than two separate products doing the same jobs independently. There’s no dedicated storage unit needed, no extra display piece required. The dining set is the décor, and the décor is the dining set.

Art-ware is a prototype and the first in a planned series of designs that expand the idea further. The concept is broad enough to go well beyond tableware, and Jantzen has spent decades applying this kind of thinking to furniture, architecture, and public installations. The dining set is a compact version of the same logic: objects that commit fully to their function while quietly doing something else on the side.

The post Art-ware Is the Dining Set That Never Has to Go in a Cabinet first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Rotating Solar House Grows Fish and Plants Entirely on Its Own

Posted on by

Aquaponic gardening has been getting a lot of attention as a more sustainable way to grow food, especially in urban settings where arable land isn’t exactly plentiful. The concept pairs fish and plants in a closed-loop system where each supports the other, cutting out synthetic fertilizers and reducing water waste. Most implementations, though, tend to be utilitarian and aren’t built to handle seasonal changes without significant supplemental energy input.

That’s the problem Michael Jantzen’s Eco-Aquaponic House was designed to tackle. Built as a public exhibit for a botanical garden, it functions more like a machine than a greenhouse, engineered to grow fish and plants together in an energy-efficient and largely self-sustaining way. Jantzen, whose work merges art, architecture, technology, and sustainable design, has been experimenting with this kind of thinking for over 50 years.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

The system works on a simple but elegant biological loop. Fish waste is cycled through the roots of the surrounding plants as a natural fertilizer. The plants filter the water, which then returns to the fish tank. The cycle repeats continuously with minimal outside input, keeping both fish and plants alive. It’s the kind of closed-loop food production that makes conventional growing methods look rather wasteful by comparison.

What makes the structure particularly clever is how it manages growing conditions year-round without demanding much energy. Six sections rotate around a central pivot point, each serving a different climate function. Two insulated panels wrap around the interior during cold nights to retain heat. Two shade screen sections shield the plants on hot days. Two glass sections open to let in outside air when conditions allow.

The passive thermal management doesn’t stop there. Built around the perimeter of the stationary base are large tubes filled with a heat-retention material that absorbs solar energy during the day and releases it slowly at night, helping keep the fish and plants warm through winter without relying on active heating systems. Those same tubes also moderate daytime temperatures, preventing the interior from overheating when the sun is strong.

On top sits a sun-tracking solar cell array that follows the sun throughout the day, supplying most of the structure’s electrical needs, including the large lamp hung over the central fish tank. Small windows built into the glass sections allow for additional ventilation control when the glass is in the closed position, letting you fine-tune interior conditions depending on what the fish and plants need at any given time.

Inside, plant trays are built into the perimeter of the structure, forming a ring of greenery around the central cylindrical fish tank. Visitors to the botanical garden can get a sense of the system from the outside, or arrange private tours for a closer look from inside through the rear entry door. As a public exhibit, it’s designed as much to teach people about aquaponic gardening as it is to actually grow. It’s a growing facility that takes care of itself season after season, with very little outside intervention required.

The post This Rotating Solar House Grows Fish and Plants Entirely on Its Own first appeared on Yanko Design.

Giant Sculptures Look Like Machines but, Nobody Knows What They Do

Posted on by

Most public sculptures ask you to stand in front of them and feel something, usually reverence, awe, or a vague sense of civic pride. They represent people, events, or abstract ideals, but they rarely suggest function. A figure cast in bronze doesn’t appear to be doing anything, and that’s largely the point. The statue commemorates; it doesn’t operate. The relationship between viewer and object is, by design, entirely passive.

Michael Jantzen had a different idea. The Santa Fe-based designer set out to create public sculptures that look like they’re built to do something, even if no one, including Jantzen himself, can say what that something is. The result is the Monumental Engines of Creation, a concept series drawing from the visual language of high-technology hardware, assembled into objects that feel purposeful, alien, and oddly believable all at once.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

The design process is telling. Jantzen didn’t start with a function and work backward to a form, as industrial designers typically do. He built the pieces intuitively, combining various components into composites that simply suggest some kind of high-level intelligence at work. The question of what they might actually be for was deliberately left unanswered, and that open-endedness is precisely what gives the series its strange pull.

Standing near one of these sculptures, you’d spend a while trying to decode it. Jantzen’s hope is that viewers engage with the objects and find themselves genuinely wondering about their origin, their creators, and their purpose. That kind of sustained curiosity is harder to provoke than it sounds. Most public sculptures deliver their meaning almost immediately; these deliberately withhold it, rewarding prolonged attention with more questions rather than answers.

Part of why that works is scale. Each piece in the series is intentionally gigantic, dwarfing any person nearby to the point of near insignificance. That proportion isn’t accidental; Jantzen designed the scale to convey the symbolic weight of each object relative to its imagined function. A machine built to scatter the seeds of creativity throughout the universe, the thinking goes, should probably look the part.

There’s something worth sitting with in the idea that creativity itself deserves monuments. Most of what we commemorate in public space is history, politics, or governance. Jantzen’s machines point somewhere else, toward imagination, invention, and the strange optimism embedded in building. They don’t ask to be understood. They ask to be wondered at, which turns out to be a different, and arguably more honest, kind of public art.

The post Giant Sculptures Look Like Machines but, Nobody Knows What They Do first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Coffee Table Turns Into Abstract Sculpture by Loosening 2 Knobs

Posted on by

Furniture has always had a love-hate relationship with art. Some pieces are so carefully considered in form that they become objects of admiration, almost too precious to actually use. Others are purely utilitarian and couldn’t care less about looking good. Few pieces try to genuinely blur that line, but that’s the territory experimental artist and designer Michael Jantzen has been working in for decades.

His Interactive Segmented Tables are a compelling example of that approach. These aren’t concepts or prototypes; they’re actual, built furniture that sits in a room and waits for you to decide what they should be. At any given moment, they can work as a proper low table for a drink or a book, and with a few turns of their knobs, transform into something that belongs in a gallery.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

The mechanism behind this is disarmingly simple. Each table is made up of identical segments threaded along a center support rod, held in place by two disc-shaped knobs on either end. Loosen those knobs, and you can rotate each segment independently into any configuration you like. Each segment has at least one flat side, so aligning enough of them with flat faces pointing upward turns the whole thing into a stable surface.

This is where the tables stop being passive objects and start being tools of expression. You might rotate the segments into something visually striking when guests arrive, then pull them flat when you need an actual surface for a lamp or a tray. The piece adapts to the occasion rather than the other way around, which is rarely something a table can honestly claim to do.

What makes this even more interesting is that the segments are two-toned, so rotating them doesn’t just change the table’s shape; it also shifts its color pattern. A configuration that shows one dominant tone can open up into a mix of both with a single rearrangement. You could work with the same piece for years and never feel like you’ve fully exhausted what it can look like.

The Interactive Segmented Tables also aren’t locked into a single form factor. Jantzen designed them to be available in many different sizes and table shapes, and they can be made from a range of materials. This means the same essential concept can translate into very different objects, depending on what a space or an owner calls for, without losing what makes them worth owning in the first place.

For anyone tired of furniture that commits too hard to a single personality, these tables offer something different. There’s a quiet pleasure in knowing you can reach down, loosen two knobs, and change what’s sitting in your living room without buying anything new. Few objects manage to be this honest about the fact that taste and function aren’t always fixed, and that’s a more useful quality than it sounds.

The post This Coffee Table Turns Into Abstract Sculpture by Loosening 2 Knobs first appeared on Yanko Design.

Jantzen’s EV Station Turns the Desert’s Worst Feature Into Its Power

Posted on by

Electric vehicles have been gaining ground steadily, but one of the more stubborn problems hasn’t been the cars themselves; it’s been finding somewhere to charge them when you’re far from a city. In a high desert environment, that problem gets considerably more pointed. The open stretch between towns can be long, the heat unforgiving, and the typical charging infrastructure designed with urban convenience in mind rather than remote landscape realities.

Designer Michael Jantzen, based in Santa Fe, has been exploring exactly this gap with his proposal for the High Desert Charging Station, a large steel solar-powered facility conceived specifically for hot, sunny desert environments. The design doesn’t try to transplant a suburban charging setup into an unfamiliar context. It takes the desert’s most defining characteristic, its relentless sun, as the primary resource.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

The structure is built around a circular plan, with a large solar panel disc elevated on a tapered central pedestal. Sunlight converts directly into electricity for the vehicles below. When generation exceeds demand, the excess feeds back into the local power grid. When the sun isn’t enough, the grid returns electricity to the station, keeping all 16 charging spots running regardless of conditions.

Those 16 spots are arranged symmetrically around the facility’s perimeter, each one marked by a concrete docking pad, a pair of yellow security bumpers, and a dedicated charging pedestal. Walkways connect each spot inward toward the center, threading through alternating patches of synthetic green grass that bring a small but deliberate contrast to the surrounding landscape. It’s a reminder that the design intends to do more than just charge cars.

Jantzen intends the walkways and ground-level layout to feel more like a destination than a service stop. The synthetic grass patches introduce a note of green into an otherwise arid setting, and the circular plan gives the facility a clear sense of orientation. You pull in, follow a path inward, and arrive at a shaded space at the center. The sequence is deliberate.

That’s where the shade canopy comes in. The open steel framework radiates outward from the central core, creating a covered space beneath the solar panel above. Drivers aren’t expected to stand in the open desert heat while their vehicles charge. They can move inside, where yellow cylindrical seats and a restroom built into the central structure make the wait genuinely more comfortable.

The whole thing is conceived as a landmark as much as it is a facility. Jantzen describes the conceptual logic as electricity flowing from the sun, down through the structure, and into the vehicles below, a visible cycle that gives the station a coherent narrative from top to bottom. That kind of intentionality is what separates it from the standard box-and-cable approach that dominates most existing charging infrastructure.

EV adoption in remote and rural areas still lags, in part because the charging infrastructure hasn’t caught up with demand. A proposal like this doesn’t solve that shortfall outright, but it does ask a more useful question than most: not how to transplant an existing model into the desert, but how to let the desert itself dictate what the design becomes.

The post Jantzen’s EV Station Turns the Desert’s Worst Feature Into Its Power 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.

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.

These 4 Solar Pavilions Prove That Public Cooling Can Be Free

Posted on by

Heat is one of the most underestimated side effects of climate change, particularly in cities where built-up surfaces trap warmth long after the sun has gone down. Air conditioning has become a near-necessity in many parts of the world, yet millions of people can’t access it, either because they can’t afford it or because they simply have no home to cool. For them, that absence can be genuinely dangerous.

Cool Retreats is a direct response to that reality. Rather than a single structure, it’s a collection of four different solar-powered public pavilions, each built to provide free cooling, shade, and a place to rest to anyone who needs it. The project is specifically aimed at public parks and open areas, particularly in cities where those who need relief the most often have the fewest options.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

The Solar Ceiling Fan Pavilion is the most straightforward of the four, an open-frame structure with tilted solar panels across its roof and a row of ceiling fans hanging beneath. The logic is elegantly direct: sunlight hits the panels, the panels power the fans, and the space below stays cool. On cooler days, when the fans aren’t running, the surplus electricity feeds back into the local power grid.

The Solar Breeze Oasis Pavilion scales things up with a prefabricated, modular, octagonal steel structure that can be installed as a single unit or linked with others to form larger configurations. Inside, five solar-powered ceiling fans circulate air above seating areas and worktables, and solar-powered outlets let people charge their devices. The rooftop solar array also collects rainwater, which can be stored and used within the park.

Cool Spots are the most self-contained of the group. Each cylindrical module sits on a circular concrete base, with four large benches arranged around a central table and a solar-powered ceiling fan overhead. Built-in night lights and power ports extend their usefulness well into the evening, and the modules can run off batteries charged by their own solar arrays or pull power from the local grid as needed.

The Cooling Cone is the most visually striking of the four, a stacked, louvered structure that tapers into a cone at the top, where a solar panel powers a ceiling fan mounted just below it. The partially enclosed perimeter, made up of curved, slotted panels, provides both shade and ventilation. It’s the kind of structure that draws you in from the outside and keeps you comfortable once you’re there.

What ties all four together is their shared philosophy: cooling public space shouldn’t require a power bill, complex infrastructure, or permanent construction. Each structure is prefabricated, recyclable, and solar-powered, designed to go where it’s needed most and run without ongoing costs. It’s a reminder that public design can be both socially conscious and sustainable at the same time, without one ever having to come at the expense of the other.

The post These 4 Solar Pavilions Prove That Public Cooling Can Be Free first appeared on Yanko Design.

Michael Jantzen’s Garden Retreat Has 30 Panels to Rearrange by Hand

Posted on by

Most garden structures ask one thing of you: sit still and enjoy the shade. A pergola is a pergola, a gazebo is a gazebo, and neither one particularly cares what the afternoon light is doing. Michael Jantzen’s Interactive Garden Pavilion operates on a different premise entirely, one where the occupant has as much say over the structure as the designer did.

Built from sustainably grown stained wood and painted a uniform forest green, the pavilion sits on an octagonal support frame fitted with 30 slatted hinged panels across its walls and roof. Each panel pivots independently, sliding and rotating along the frame before locking into position. Open them wide on a hot afternoon, and the interior breathes. Angle them down against the glare, and the space dims considerably.

Designer: Jantzen

That last point is where the design earns its name. Most adjustable outdoor structures offer a single variable, usually an awning or a retractable canopy, within an otherwise fixed form. Here, the entire skin of the building is the variable. The wall panels, roof panels, and ground-level platform extensions can all be repositioned, which means the pavilion can look substantially different from one afternoon to the next.

Pull the panels shut on three sides, and the structure becomes a genuinely private enclosure. Splay them open, and the interior connects fully to the garden around it. In one arrangement, it reads as a dense closed form. In another, the structure opens up entirely, and the slatted framework becomes almost sculptural against the lawn.

Inside, two benches with adjustable backrests run the length of the interior, facing each other. The seating is built into the frame, which keeps the floor plan clean and leaves room to recline fully. When the overhead panels are partially open, sunlight enters in sharp parallel bands that shift across the benches as the day moves, a quality that is either meditative or distracting depending on what you came in for.

The construction logic is also notably practical. The pavilion is a prefabricated modular system, so the components can be scaled before assembly or joined with additional units to form a larger cluster. No foundation is required in most configurations. Given its size and type, a building permit is unlikely to be needed in many jurisdictions, which removes one of the more tedious barriers between an interesting design and an actual garden.

Jantzen has spent decades proposing architecture that responds dynamically to its occupants, much of it remaining on paper. This pavilion is one of the cases where the idea got built, and the result holds up at close range. The slatted wood is honest about what it is, the green paint ties the structure to the garden without trying to disappear into it, and the hinge mechanism does exactly what it promises.

The post Michael Jantzen’s Garden Retreat Has 30 Panels to Rearrange by Hand first appeared on Yanko Design.

These Solar Gazebos Have 4 Wind Turbines and Let You Charge Below

Posted on by

University campuses function like small cities. Students move between buildings, find outdoor spots to read or work, and constantly need power for phones and laptops. Sustainability tends to get communicated through plaques, rooftop panels, and annual reports, things you don’t interact with. There’s a gap between “this campus is reducing its carbon footprint” and “here’s a place where you can sit, charge your phone, and actually experience that in some tangible way.”

Michael Jantzen’s Solar Wind Gazebos are public pavilions designed to close that gap. Intended for university campuses, they function as gathering spaces while generating electricity from sun and wind, with the power feeding into the university’s grid. The proposal treats renewable infrastructure as a place to inhabit rather than a system to install, and it makes that infrastructure legible to anyone who walks up to one.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

The roof does most of the communicating. Four commercially available vertical-axis wind turbines sit at the corners, while a large circular solar panel occupies the center. That layout is easy to read at a glance: wind at the perimeter, sun at the core. You don’t need a label to understand what’s happening because the structure’s own geometry explains its energy logic, which is something most utility infrastructure completely fails to do.

The frame is predominantly stainless steel on concrete bases, which is a deliberate choice for outdoor public installations. Campuses need structures that handle weather, seasonal temperature swings, and constant use without requiring frequent maintenance windows. Stainless steel and concrete aren’t glamorous materials, but they’re honest ones for a building type that needs to outlast a decade of students without becoming an eyesore or a liability.

Inside, four cylindrical seating spaces are attached to the support columns, each with a receptacle at the top for plugging in devices. That detail is quiet but important, turning charging into a normal part of sitting down outdoors rather than a task that sends students hunting for an outlet inside a building. A large round central platform offers a shared surface for sitting or lying down, creating a mix of semi-private individual zones and an open communal gathering area.

A circular electric light mounted above the central platform runs off the same solar and wind generation, extending the pavilion’s usefulness into evening hours. The structure essentially powers its own ambience, which gives the whole thing a satisfying sense of completion, generation, use, and light running off the same rooftop.

The gazebos are designed to be reproduced as prefabricated structures in various sizes and installed across different landscapes. The same concept fits public parks, corporate campuses, and any open space where people gather and need shade, seating, and somewhere to plug in. The broader implication is that renewable energy infrastructure doesn’t always have to hide behind fences or sit on rooftops. Sometimes it can be the very thing you sit inside of on a Tuesday afternoon between classes.

The post These Solar Gazebos Have 4 Wind Turbines and Let You Charge Below first appeared on Yanko Design.