Urban Street Furniture

Urban street furniture is one of the architectural landscape elements which is used for urban environment beautification together with planting. The term “architectural landscape elements” implies constructions, facilities or decoration elements of outdoor beautification that supplement the main parts of built-up areas. Each of you, while walking along the streets of your dear city (hope you love the city you live in), sees outdoor furniture: benches, seats, city chairs (a sort of bench with a back). Just think for a moment: do you like this street furniture? In most cases it is just a steel construction supplemented with wooden elements. Let us guess what requirements should be put forward to urban furniture so that we like it, it stands for a long time, it pleases the sight and does not lose its good looks with time. When you look at the furniture in most Russian cities you come to the conclusion that most manufacturers never ask think about it.

So, what are the criteria? Let us study them one by one:

1. Economy. Unfortunately this is the basic requirement that is to be followed by the city governments while declaring a tender on urban areas beautification. But low price does not mean high quality, beauty and durability. That is why there are several more requirements.

2. Street furniture aesthetics. This needs explanation. The furniture must suit the architectural, composition and art patterns of urban environment. We think you will agree that a steel bench which is common for Russian cities would look inappropriate in Peterhoff. It would be a thorn in the flesh. That is why this requirement should be taken into account while choosing the outdoor furniture. Moreover, the appearances of such urban furniture should be considered when the design of micro district is planned, because it should be in harmony with the surroundings. This requirement is for sure important. But there are some more.

3. Safety of urban furniture. Measures of danger lessening of urban furniture must be taken already at the designing stage. For example, what is to be taken into account while designing children playground equipment? First of all, it is the height of the construction providing minimal injuries (better no injuries at all) if a child falls down off it. We should also take into account shape peculiarities: maximal round shapes, absence of acute angles, as well as observance of hygiene and sanitary conditions, surface texture, etc. Such requirements are abundant, they all must be followed and touch not only children playground equipment, but urban street furniture as well.

4. Functionality of urban furniture. It is necessary that the overall dimensions should be chosen in advance, as well as materials selected, particular construction solutions worked out taking into account function and possible peculiarities of the use of street furniture. For instance, park furniture should stand through mass festivals. And we know that our people usually disparage city property. Consequently, park furniture must be protected from acts of vandalism as much as possible, so that nobody can break it and can get injured.

5. Technological properties of street furniture. Peculiarities of used materials and production technology are to be considered. And this often influences the price of articles.

6. One more requirement put forward to urban furniture that should be mentioned is its universality. Such street furniture should have minimum details, so that even a person without special training can assemble it. It is not an airplane or a car, is it?

Unfortunately, only a few urban furniture suppliers at the modern market take into account these requirements during production. After a shallow inspection of the samples one can notice that all the urban furniture is divided into steel, wooden, concrete, stone and the so called compound. In this furniture you can find all the materials used in above mentioned types if street furniture. To my personal mind (and many engineers and designers working in the sphere of street furniture design agree with it!) the latter kind of the furniture lets follow all the above mentioned requirements put forward to urban furniture as much as possible. Unfortunately, it will always yield to steel and wooden furniture in price. And that means that there will be little furniture of such kind in our streets until we manage to persuade the city authorities and lawmakers that price is not the basic point in urban furniture. The main thing is that it should meet all the mentioned here requirements.

In my opinion, Krasnoyarsk citizens are the luckiest people in this respect, because our government understands that tomorrow is with such furniture. City benches and litter bins with stone cheeks and firm metal frame are installed in many streets of the city, in parks and squares. So, let us take over this experience!

Article Source: http://www.largedirectory.info

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