stacked street remodels forgotten bricks & curbs into street furniture

yuval harel & Leopold Inkapööl redefine the urban landscape

In an ongoing exploration of the static nature of our urban fabrics, Yuval Harel and Leopold Inkapööl gather fragments of the street at their broken, forgotten, and discarded phases, transforming them into public furniture pieces. Their ‘Stacked Street’ series begins on the streets of Eindhoven at Dutch Design Week 2022, re-curating the city landscape by using the elements that make up its immediate environment: bricks and curbs. The result is a series of curious, geometric compositions of stacked and balanced blocks of concrete, scattered around the city for playful street seating options.

‘With quick methods and easy tools we reorganize the materials and make them into something else. Planned on spot, made for the place and with what we could get and what we can create from it. We take from the city and we give back to it,’ write Harel and Inkapööl.

all images courtesy Yuval Harel and Leopold Inkapööl

‘Stacked street’ takes from the city and gives back to it

As part of their graduation project for Design Academy Eindhoven, designers Yuval Harel and Leopold Inkapööl question notions of ownership, permanence, and adaptability with their public interventions. Thinking about the static arrangements of public spaces as fixed by municipalities juxtaposed with people’s nature to move around, interact with and shape our environments, the design duo finds an adaptive solution — shaping the city by taking from it and giving back to it.

Creating street furniture from street materials, the designers preserve and celebrate the raw aesthetics of bricks and concrete curbs, recomposing broken fragments into new functions with an instinctive visual language that contrast the hyper organized public surrounding. The connections between the components were formed by vibrant glue, a small detail which added the designers’ signature to the pieces.

‘Stacked Street’ in Eindhoven

‘We see design as our skillset and method to provoke changes. We want to have a livelier city, one that is influenced by its inhabitants. A city that moves with its people. We want to be part of the public space, not only dwell in it. We want to make a mark, leave a trace, for ourselves and for others… To see what happens when you give something to a city. To see how the public adopts it. We are questioning how public the public space really is,’ note the designers.

chalk drawings were added on later by children in the neighbourhood

the project repurposes the urban fabric for new playful ways of interacting with the environment

the only colored object of the series

bench made of 90 degree curbs and a curved curb, pushing the constructive limits of these materials

bright glue holds the structures together and marks Yuval Harel and Leopold Inkapööl’s signature

the designers found the components of this piece re-stacked by the public

this piece was the only furniture which could hold itself in place without the need for glue

project info:

name: Stacked Street

designer: Yuval Harel & Leopold Inkapööl

designboom has received this project from our DIY submissions feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here.

edited by: ravail khan | designboom