Monday, September 5, 2011

Rocking Chairs, Coffee Tables & Bus Stops

The other day I was driving along a main thoroughfare in Maryland and noticed brightly colored rocking chairs, benches, and Adirondack chairs at each bus stop along the way.

Colorful Rocking Chairs, New Hampshire at Devonshire

The same day, I stumbled across an article about a designer who placed a coffee table at a bus stop in LA.

From Good...
Julie Kim placed a coffee table she designed at a bus stop on a busy corner in Koreatown and shot video from a far enough distance that people didn't know they were being filmed. The table—set with a newspaper and a vase of flowers—becomes a hub of interaction for the corner. People not only flock to the table, they end up talking to each other about it. Kim says she was surprised to see so many serendipitous moments in what amounted to only eight minutes of video.

Kim thinks that creating better environments for transit riders is certainly a missed opportunity for the city. "People wait for a while at these stops, 15 to 20 minutes," she says. "This is an opportunity for the city to engage them." Included in her growing ideas of creating "surreal, out-of-place" situations, is the idea of building exercise equipment at stops, so people could squeeze a few pull-ups in.

Those two discoveries led me down the rabbit hole of bus stop design. A few innovative bus stops from around the world...





No comments:

LinkWithin

Related Posts