In Street: Seating Infrastructure Drawn from the Branching Logic of City Roads

What if the street itself could teach a bench how to behave? In Street takes the branching, forking geometry of urban road networks and translates it into a seating system that feels less like furniture and more like a small piece of civic infrastructure. Walnut wood bands split and converge across stainless steel supports, creating a landscape of surfaces at 16.5", 18", and 30" high, so a toddler, an elderly resident, and someone perched at a counter height can all find a place within the same structure.

The project is the work of Jingyi Wang, published on uni.xyz. It sits at the intersection of public furniture and decorative art, proposing installations that can scale from a broad plaza down to a narrow lane. Alongside the seating bands, stainless steel "information bands" carry text about city history, district identity, or local commerce, turning a rest stop into a quiet act of cultural exchange.

Street Patterns Abstracted into a Branching Plan

Seen from above, the installation reads like a transit map made physical. The plan drawing reveals how walnut bands radiate from a dense center and split outward, mimicking the way secondary streets peel away from a main artery. This is not ornamental metaphor; the branching determines where people sit, how groups cluster, and where individuals can tuck away for solitude. The varying widths of the bands also hint at hierarchy: wider sections invite shared occupation, while narrower fingers suggest a solo perch.

A Curving Assembly Held by Steel Verticals

The sectional and perspective drawings expose the structural logic. Stainless steel verticals rise at irregular intervals, carrying the walnut bands at their three prescribed heights. Because the bands curve in plan, the supports must negotiate changing angles, and the detail drawing of the joint connection makes this legible: a steel bracket wraps the wood member and is secured by screws that allow slight rotational adjustment. It is a precise, repeatable connection that can accommodate the freeform geometry without bespoke fabrication for every joint.

Material choice reinforces the design's dual ambition. Walnut gives warmth and tactile grain, the kind of surface people instinctively want to touch. Stainless steel provides the corrosion resistance and load capacity needed for outdoor, high-traffic placement. Together they create a deliberate contrast: organic surface, industrial skeleton.

After Dark, Lighting Turns Furniture into Landmark

The night rendering shifts the reading of the installation entirely. Integrated lighting traces the underside of the walnut bands, casting a warm glow across the ground plane and silhouetting the people gathered around it. Red human figures emphasize the social choreography the design intends: small groups leaning on the higher bands, a child seated at the lowest level, passersby pausing because the glow signals something worth approaching. In a cultural or business district, this luminous presence converts a piece of street furniture into an after-hours anchor for public life.

Wang's proposal also accounts for constrained sites. Modular versions of the same branching system can be trimmed to fit narrow streets and pocket plazas without sacrificing the design language. Whether deployed as a large sculptural installation or a single branching segment, the formal vocabulary remains consistent, which is critical for building district identity across varied urban conditions.

Why This Project Matters

Public seating is often treated as an afterthought, selected from a catalog and bolted to the sidewalk. In Street argues for something more purposeful: furniture that carries spatial intelligence borrowed from the city itself. The three seat heights alone represent a commitment to inclusivity that most standard benches ignore. Add the information bands and integrated lighting, and the object begins to perform as a micro-institution, offering rest, knowledge, and atmosphere simultaneously.

Jingyi Wang's contribution is a reminder that the line between architecture and furniture is productive territory. When a bench starts branching like a street, it stops being an object placed in the city and becomes a small extension of it. That conceptual shift, from furniture to infrastructure, is exactly the kind of thinking public space needs more of.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Jingyi Wang

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Project credits: In Street by Jingyi Wang.