1x1 Industrial Urban Furniture: One Square Meter at a Time on Copenhagen's Shipyard Island

What if a city's public furniture could grow, shrink, and reconfigure itself as freely as the communities it serves? The 1x1 Industrial Urban Furniture system answers that question with a deceptively simple premise: a standardized one-meter-by-one-meter three-dimensional grid of vertical pipe structures that accepts interchangeable modules for seating, planting, shading, and vertical circulation. The result is not a fixed object but a spatial toolkit, one that lets a waterfront promenade become a street food market by the weekend and a community garden by the following month.

Designed by Mykolas Šečkus and Antonio Gandolfo, the project won the Urbanscape: Symbiosis competition. The site is Refshaleøen Island in Copenhagen, a former shipyard that has reinvented itself as a hub of creative and cultural activity. That industrial lineage runs through every detail of the proposal: steel pipe frames, timber cladding, and a deliberately scaffolding-like aesthetic that treats permanence as optional and adaptation as the default.

Refshaleøen's Industrial DNA as Design Language

The collage of site references sets the tone immediately: planted pathways, scaffolding wrapped around warehouse facades, cyclists along the waterfront. Refshaleøen is not a blank slate but a palimpsest of heavy industry, emerging culture, and provisional landscapes. Šečkus and Gandolfo read that context carefully. Their system echoes the structural grammar of shipyard scaffolding, using steel frames as the primary organizing element while timber cladding softens the surfaces people actually touch. The isometric rendering of the base module reveals the logic: a steel skeleton at the one-meter increment, with planters and seating slotted into its bays like cargo into a ship's hold.

Configurations that Scale from Bench to Boulevard

The strength of any modular system lives or dies in the range of configurations it can produce without losing coherence. Here the designers demonstrate at least three distinct assemblies. Rows of benches gain overhead trailing planters that create a green canopy, turning a simple seating row into a shaded linear garden. A stacked planter structure integrates stairs and multiple planted levels, pushing the grid vertically and suggesting the system could serve as an inhabited green wall or a tiered viewing platform. A third arrangement clusters benches and planters around mature trees, creating an informal courtyard within the grid.

What holds these variations together is the consistent structural rhythm. The one-meter grid never disappears; it simply accepts different programmatic infills. That discipline is what separates a genuine system from a collection of one-off installations. You can imagine a city maintenance crew swapping modules seasonally, or a festival organizer reconfiguring an entire plaza in a matter of hours.

The Waterfront Test: Rendered Ambition Meets Photorealistic Context

Placing modular furniture on a sun-drenched harbor promenade is the ultimate test of whether a system reads as architecture or as equipment. The waterfront rendering succeeds because the overhead planters lend the installation a canopy-like presence, giving it enough visual weight to hold its own against the scale of the harbor without blocking sightlines to the water. Adjacent to this, the vertical tower configuration pushes the system to its most ambitious expression: steel columns, timber platforms at multiple levels, and plantings cascading down. Figures stand and sit at different heights, suggesting that the grid can generate not just furniture but genuine public infrastructure, something closer to a pavilion than a bench.

Gravel, Timber, and the Quiet Power of Material Restraint

The most convincing images are often the quietest. A gravel plaza with timber benches and planted boxes, backed by existing industrial buildings, shows the 1x1 system at its most understated. Slatted timber planters and seating arranged before a converted warehouse facade reinforce the point: these modules do not compete with their context but absorb it. The material palette of steel and timber is deliberately limited, ensuring the system ages alongside the industrial structures rather than against them. Durability is built into the selection, with materials chosen to withstand coastal urban conditions while maintaining an honest, low-maintenance character.

Why This Project Matters

Modular urban furniture proposals are common in student competitions, but most fall into one of two traps: they are either so generic that they could be placed anywhere, or so site-specific that their modularity becomes moot. The 1x1 system avoids both. Its industrial aesthetic is clearly born from Refshaleøen's shipyard heritage, yet the underlying grid logic is universal enough to migrate to any mixed-use urban environment. That balance between specificity and portability is rare and worth studying.

Šečkus and Gandolfo also resist the temptation to over-design. The one-meter grid is a constraint that generates variety rather than limiting it, and the decision to foreground resilience and reconfigurability over formal novelty speaks to a mature understanding of how public spaces actually evolve. Cities do not need more signature objects; they need spatial systems that can absorb change gracefully. The 1x1 system offers exactly that, one square meter at a time.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Mykolas Šečkus, Antonio Gandolfo

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Project credits: 1x1 Industrial Urban Furniture by Mykolas Šečkus, Antonio Gandolfo Urbanscape: Symbiosis (uni.xyz).