1Y Architects Stacks Red Plastic Stools into a Tapering Tower for Foshan's Creative Week

Anyone who has eaten at a street-side dai pai dong, waited outside a wet market or watched a neighbourhood card game in southern China knows the red plastic stool. It is cheap, stackable and everywhere, and few people ever think about it. For the 2026 Foshan International Cultural & Creative Week, 1Y Architects, led by Fan Chang, made it the subject of a 36 m² installation called Stool Tower. The studio studied everyday Cantonese life and searched for one object that could carry the weight of local folk culture. It chose the stool.

What interests us is not the pop-art gesture of making a monument out of a mundane object. That move is familiar. The interest lies in how literally the stool remains a stool. The installation tapers upward from an open steel base, and its lower edge hangs low enough to work as a canopy, so people come and sit underneath it, often on more red stools. The object is displayed and used in the same place. This piece argues that the vernacular furniture of the street can define a public room rather than merely decorate one.

A Monument Made of Something Disposable

On the paved plaza, the tower reads as a cylinder of red and white specks that narrows as it rises. Guy lines tie it to the ground and openly acknowledge that it is a temporary structure. 1Y Architects does not hide the rigging, and that honesty suits the subject. The stool is an object of impermanence, bought by the dozen and replaced when it cracks, so a pavilion built from stools should look as though it could be packed away by next week.

The distant view under heavy clouds shows the scale problem the designers faced. On an open urban plaza, a 36 m² footprint could easily disappear. The vertical stacking gives the piece a silhouette that holds its own against the sky, and the saturated red does the rest. You can spot it across the square before you can tell what it is made of. That delay between seeing and recognising gives the installation its charm.

The Stool as a Building Unit

In close-up, the system becomes clear. Each stool is fixed to thin red steel rods at its own angle, so the surface ripples instead of lying flat. Against a blue sky, the legs and seats form a dense, almost woven texture. At night, the checkered seats in red and grey pack tightly together, and the hole at the centre of each seat repeats across the field like a perforation pattern.

That central hole is a small but telling detail. It exists so you can lift and carry the stool, and here it becomes a source of light and porosity. The designers did not alter the object at all. They simply rotated it, multiplied it and let its own features produce the ornament. Few installations show this much restraint, and we think it is the right call: once you begin customising the stool, it stops being the stool everyone recognises.

A Canopy You Can Sit Under

The strongest images show people underneath the structure. A seated visitor rests in the dappled light where tree shadows and stool shadows overlap on the paving. Another visitor reaches up to touch the underside of a white stool. Two people sit on low red stools directly beneath the hanging cluster, with an event stage's steel truss in the background. The installation functions as shelter, seating area and tactile object all at once.

This is where the concept pays off. A red stool on the pavement signals that you can stop here, sit down and talk to a neighbour. By hanging hundreds of them overhead and placing a few more on the ground, the tower turns that signal into a defined space. The plaza does not need a planted grove or a costly pavilion to gain a gathering point. It needs a familiar cue, repeated at enough scale.

Scaffold, Clamps and the Open Core

Standing at the centre and looking up, you see what the outside conceals: an open void ringed by stools, with steel tube clamps framing a cloudy sky. The interior feels like a chimney or an oculus, a quiet counterpoint to the busy exterior. It also shows that the structure is essentially a scaffold, the same kit of tubes and couplers that wraps buildings under construction across Chinese cities.

The construction photograph completes that reading. Workers in straw hats, from the construction team N-Design, stack red and white stools onto a red scaffold frame under a clear sky. Both components come from everyday urban life: one from the street café, the other from the building site. Pairing them makes the installation read as a portrait of the Cantonese city made from its most ordinary hardware.

After Dark

At night, the tower changes register. Lit from within and below, it glows red and white, and the stools align into diagonal bands against the black sky. Crowds gather and sit beneath it, which suggests the piece works as well as a night-market lantern as it does as a daytime sunshade. Plastic, usually the least dignified of materials, holds light well here, and the translucency of the seats adds a warmth the daytime photos only hint at.

For a festival installation, the night performance matters as much as the day. Cultural weeks in southern Chinese cities draw their crowds after sunset, when the heat breaks. A pavilion that only works in sunlight would miss its main audience. This one becomes more inviting as the evening goes on.

Plans and Drawings

The plan shows the stools arranged as an octagonal ring of overlapping outlines around an open central void, dimensioned at 5800 millimetres across. The elevation shows the tower as stacked stool tiers that taper above a tall, open steel base, which explains how people can walk and sit underneath it. The hand sketch states the whole idea most clearly: a tapering tower beside a single four-legged stool labelled as the repeating pattern. The entire project grows from that one unit.

Why This Project Matters

Stool Tower reminds us that regional identity does not have to come from temple roofs, carved lattice screens or other heritage motifs. It can come from what people actually use every day. By choosing the red plastic stool, 1Y Architects grounded a festival piece in contemporary Cantonese street life rather than in a curated past, and it did so without irony. The stool is treated with respect, not as a joke.

The project also shows how a temporary installation can earn its place in a plaza by being useful. It casts shade, gathers people and invites touch, and it is built from parts that can be dismantled and reused. For designers working on small budgets and short timelines, the lesson is clear: find the object your community already trusts, repeat it with discipline, and let people treat it exactly as they always have.

Stool Tower by 1Y Architects (lead architect Fan Chang), Foshan, China. Area: 36 m². Year: 2027. Client: SMART Cultural and Creative Co., Ltd. Construction: N-Design. Photography by Yifan Chen.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.