Arup designs parklets to help Liverpool's restaurants reopen during social distancing measures

Engineering firm Arup has designed parklets, hybrid street furniture and planters to help Liverpool's restaurants reopen as the UK's coronavirus lockdown lifts.

Arup collaborated with the city council and Meristem Design to develop the scheme, called Liverpool Without Walls. The modular elements slot together to create outdoor seating areas made from hardwood, screened from each other with plants and perspex glass.

The modular designs can be cleaned easily according to Arup

"The modular parklets are designed to be easily swept up, cleaned and washed down with flexible furniture which can be easily moved," said Arup's Jonathan Mottershead.

"The cafe-style seating means that chairs and tables to be easily stacked for cleaning," he told Dezeen.  "This will also enable businesses to manage customer spacing more flexibly, such as catering for different group sizes."

Nine parklets to be installed in Liverpool

Starting on 4 July the first of nine parklets will be installed on Bold Street, a thoroughfare in the city with many bars and cafes.

From 4 July in most parts of the UK pubs, restaurants and cafes will be allowed to open as part of changes to the country's lockdown rules. Only groups made up of members of two households will be able to sit indoors while dining out, however.

Groups of up to six people who are not from the same household can only gather outdoors. This means venues will need more outdoor seating and ways of keeping customers a safe distance apart.

 

Arup got the idea for the parklets from the firm's 2017 scheme called FitzPark – a temporary seating space dotted with planters installed in London's Camden neighbourhood.

"We felt that we could easily take the parklet design and adapt it to make it safe to meet social distancing guidelines to help give the bars, restaurants and cafes in Liverpool much needed outdoor space," said Mottershead.

Parklets designs for parking spaces, pavement and streets

Arup has designed four different types of parklet for Liverpool Without Walls that could be installed in parking spaces, on pavements, streets and in larger open spaces.

"Traditional parklets are those that occupy a former parking space, loading bay or single traffic lane on the carriageway," explained  Mottershead. "Pavement parklets are in spaces off-road and do not require changes to traffic or road closures," he added.

"Street parklets usually close a whole street by placing planters and vehicle security barriers at the ends of the road so that seating and parks areas can be installed. Finally, Bespoke parklets are considered for larger car parking areas or unusual shaped spaces."

Plants and perspex screens can be used to separate diners

The greenery element of the scheme, said Arup, is a key part of making sure the parklets actively improve the public space while performing their function during the pandemic.

"Hardy, drought-tolerant shrubs and perennials such as ivy, periwinkle, asters and lavender will be used to provide a variety of colour, textures and scents through the season," said Arup landscape architect Emily Woodason.

"Liverpool City Council really wants this to be a community project and are encouraging local businesses to support with watering the greenery and also helping chose the planting selection," she added.

"For example, a restaurant may wish to plant edible herbs or to grow strawberries for use in the kitchen."

 

The council is also looking at other streets that could benefit from having their own parklets. Arup designed the parklets, which take six to eight weeks to build and install, to last for up to five years. After the pandemic, the council can move them around to new spots.

"We hope the parklets become part of the independent fabric of the streets they are situated and stay providing long term benefits in reclaiming the streets for people," said Mottershead and Woodason.

Designers around the world have been responding to the coronavirus pandemic with solutions for cities to reopen safely.

Architect Ben Masterton-Smith has designed a scheme for London's Soho neighbourhood that includes decorative hygiene screens. In the US, MASS Design Group has released a report on how restaurants could be adapted.

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"This is the biggest challenge we've faced in our entire history as an institution," says RISD president

Rhode Island School of Design president Rosanne Somerson discusses how the design school has been forced to reinvent itself in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic in the penultimate talk as part of our collaboration with Friedman Benda for VDF. Tune in from 11:00am UK time.

Like many universities and design schools, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) closed its campus in March as lockdown restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of Covid-19 were implemented across the US, forcing the school to transition to teaching online.

"This is without a doubt the biggest challenge we've faced in our entire history as an institution," Somerson told curator Glenn Adamson in the latest of New York gallery Friedman Benda's Design in Dialogue interviews that Dezeen is publishing as part of Virtual Design Festival.

RISD president Rosanne Somerson. Portrait by Cary Wolinsky

"When we were forced to send our students back home, or at least off campus, we had so little warning. We did it, I think, incredibly seamlessly. But it was traumatic for the students. I mean, this is not at all what they had anticipated. And it was done to them, and to all of us, rather than by them. So it was very difficult and it raised all kinds of issues of all kinds of inequities and complexities."

RISD is "rebuilding" its entire campus

Despite the easing of lockdown restrictions, Somerson revealed that the university is having to completely revamp its campus to enable students and teachers to use its facilities while adhering to social distancing regulations when it reopens in the Autumn.

"Since [lockdown began], the world has changed five times," she said. "And we're trying to imagine a completely reinvented school that had a way of teaching and methods of learning that were very successful but can't be used at the moment."

Somerson shared work produced under lockdown by RISD students, such as fashion student Desiree Nicole Scarborough

"So we're actually rebuilding our entire campus in what we're calling a 'de-densified' manner," she continued.

"So we're essentially taking over all the spaces in the campus that we can and making them studios. We're expanding the space between equipment, we're adding opportunities for students to still be in the making facilities, but with the distancing and the protocols for disinfecting, etc., that will keep them as healthy as possible."

"So we're going class by class and basically rebuilding the space for each class. It's a very complex process."

RISD is working on developing "hybrid courses" that combine online and in-person teaching

Despite the challenges the university is working to overcome, there have been some positive outcomes of lockdown, Somerson said. The transition to online learning has meant the school has been able to widen its pool of visiting academics and critics.

"We're able to bring in internationally acclaimed critics into our classes who generally wouldn't be able to travel to do critiques in person due to age or distance or whatever reason," she said.

"We're also starting a new thing with artists' studio tours and visits. So artists are opening up their studio so that our students can sort of have a bird's eye view without travelling. So there are a number of things that we've learned from this experience that are actually expanding our learning footprint in very exciting ways."

Other projects shared by Somerson includes work by industrial design masters student Yuqing Ma

For its next intake of students starting in the Autumn, RISD is updating its courses, with a mixture of teaching online and in-person, depending on the nature of the course.

"We're in the process of going course by course and coming up with three sort of modalities," she explained.

"One is fully online, which will be a lot of our critical theory courses and seminar courses that can meet that way effectively. Some will be hybrid courses, where there will be lectures online and then making in the facilities. And some will be fully in-person."

RISD students "have made some incredible discoveries during this time"

Somerson made the comments ahead of a presentation showing innovative methods RISD's faculty have come up with to teach their students remotely, as well as work by RISD students that responds to lockdown in creative ways.

Watch the video above to see the examples of student work, which span industrial design, photography, fashion and architecture, including proposals to transform the Superman Building in Providence, Rhode Island, into a vertical farm.

Architecture projects Somerson presented included work by architecture masters student Shreya Anand, who reimagines the Superman Building in Providence as a vertical farm

"This notion of dealing with incredible uncertainty and totally new territory is the realm of artists and designers," Somerson said.

"It's the realm in which they perhaps have the best skill set to move forward. So I think it is telling that art and design students, as traumatic as this experience was, really managed to make some incredible discoveries during this time."

Design in Dialogue

Ramaker's conversation with Adamson is the eighth in a series of Friedman Benda's Design in Dialogue talks we are broadcasting as part of Virtual Design Festival throughout May and June.

Previous interviews in the series we have published include conversations with pioneering architect James Wines, who lamented the predominance of digitally created forms in architecture, and designer Faye Toogood, who revealed she suffers from imposter syndrome.

Ron Arad told Adamson that "business is always a necessary evil", Stephen Burks discussed the lack of diversity in the design industry and Joris Laarman discussed the "magic" of digital technology in previous talks in the series that we have published.

Gaetano Pesce called on young designers to consider how to address social issues through their work, while in the most recent talk, Droog co-founder Renny Ramakers reflected on how the influential platform shook up the design industry in the 1990s.

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As galleries start to re-open, here are some of the best shows to check out this month

From a digital recreation of a Rem Koolhaas design to photographs from the streets of Manchester, July’s got a lot to offer when it comes to events, exhibitions and experiences.

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ETH Zurich combines 3D printing and casting to make more efficient concrete structures

"Researchers at ETH Zurich have created a machine that controls the setting rate of concrete to offer a "seamless transition between casting and 3D printing" so that structures can be made that use less material.

The system called Fast Complexity combines two existing technologies for creating concrete forms – 3D printing concrete and casting into formwork.

It was developed by Ana Anton, Andrei Jipa, Benjamin Dillenburger from ETH Zurich's Digital Building Technologies group and Lex Reiter from its Physical Chemistry of Building Materials group.

Fast Complexity combines 3D printing and casting of concrete

By controlling the setting rate of concrete, the system can either 3D print the fast-hardening concrete for more structural elements without formwork or extrude a more fluid concrete that can flow into castings.

"The major innovation is the concrete 3D printing process developed by ETH Zurich," Anton told Dezeen.

"Our material can be digitally controlled from a fluid concrete mix to a fast hardening concrete. In this way, we can have a seamless transition between casting and 3D printing."

The system could be used to make more efficient structures

The system could lead to a reduction in the amount of concrete used to create buildings as only the material that is needed would be poured or printed.

"Both the geometry of the slab and the deposition path are optimised to only add material where needed," said Anton. "Such geometries would be otherwise too expensive to fabricate."

"That reduction is project-specific and depends on structural evaluation, but compared to a massive slab, there is a lot of space for material saving," she continued.

The researchers made a prototype slab

To demonstrate the system, the researchers 3D printed a prototype of a highly optimised post-tensioned structural slab using a 3D printed casting.

"Our prototype uses binder jetting and concrete 3D printing selectively: the optimal technique is used for the optimal project feature," said Anton.

"Binder jetting is excellent for producing precise high-resolution apparent surfaces. Concrete 3D printing can deliver rougher but fast deposition for the underlying structural elements."

The slab only has concrete where it is needed

Anton hopes that the Fast Complexity system created at ETH Zurich will form part of the advancement of 3D-printed technologies that will enable more complex structures to be printed with concrete.

"Our vision is that in the near future large-scale building components for both structural and non-structural applications will be directly 3D-printable in concrete," she said. "This opens up new material saving and design potential."

3D printing in a variety of materials is increasingly being integrated into architecture projects. Recently Chris Precht and Arthur Mamou-Mani use sand to 3D print a pavilion in Saudi Arabia, while AIRLAB used 3D-printed stainless steel nodes to build a pavilion in Singapore.

At the end of 2019 robotic construction company Apis Cor built the world's largest 3D-printed building in Dubai.

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Dahee Kim attaches bulbous beanbags to uniform-style garments

For her graduate collection at Central Saint Martins, fashion designer Dahee Kim used beanbags to create back-attachments that double as impromptu chairs.

Taking cues from the design of school uniforms, Kim wanted to use her graduate collection as a way of rejecting the strict rules and standards that "well-behaved" students have to abide by, particularly in South Korea where she grew up.

Altering the aesthetic of conventional uniforms in ways she thought a child might, Kim added unusual materials and elements such as beanbags and leg warmers to her garments.

The designer was inspired to pursue this idea after seeing an image of a child "wearing a pretty dress and holding balloons at a parade" but adopting a grumpy face.

"I really liked this picture, because children think and act what they want without being aware of their surroundings or the eyes of others," she said.

"They are always breaking rules and are self-centred. This project draws inspiration from the abandonment of rules to celebrate self-representation and individualism."

The yet-to-be-named collection comprises two main looks, one with the ball-shaped backpack-style element, and another with a onesie accessorised with a saggy hat.

The first look is a sailor-style mini dress designed to look like a modern take on a two-piece uniform, made from stretchy fabric that has been printed with puff binder for a 3D effect.

A large beanbag is secured to the back of the garment, in the way that kids might wear their backpacks underneath their clothes as a playful gesture.

The dress can double up as a resting cushion, enabling the wearer to transport a beanbag chair around on their back.

A thin material shaped like a cape is draped over the top of the beanbag and features a colourful, circular pattern. Kim completed the look with tiered leg warmers made from knitted mohair.

The second look was informed by a knitted vest that Kim used to wear at her school in South Korea. She has taken this element and made it into an all-in-one bodysuit, which features bright, psychedelic patterns printed on its bottom half.

Beanbag elements have been attached at the ankles of the garment in a bell-bottom style, and have also been used to make a floppy hat that resembles a mushroom. This has also been vibrantly printed in layers of yellow, pink and blue.

The beanbag aspects of the garments was also designed to represent the "heavy burden" of these restrictions that people wear on their shoulders.

This, according to Kim, was an "ironic" statement, as the lightness of the beanbags and their soft material make them comfortable to lie on, transforming the burden into a positive element.

"I want my collection to send the message that we should be wary of and rebellious against the familiar 'inconveniences' that we face in life, but that we rarely object to – both in school and society at large," explained Kim.

"If I wore my collection and went to school, I would probably be punished – therefore I think it's a successful collection," she added.

"I hope that, after seeing my collection, someone will be inspired to break the mould of their thoughts."

Fellow Central Saint Martins graduate Jessan Macatangay incorporated deconstructed chair frames and buckle-like accessories into his fashion collection, which features drapery made from lycra jersey and silk satin.

The five-piece collection, called Finding Beauty and Power in Struggle, is designed to symbolise how people carry the weight of personal struggles. Each look gets lighter and less bulky as they progress.

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