Stemmed from Gangstarr’s track  « Step In The Arena »

The Life is Beautiful Music and Art Festival has initiated an urban renewal of Downtown Las Vegas along with JustKid’s Curator Charlotte Dutoit. Commencing with Graffiti Artists, they’ve progressively added and started this year with Urban Design. They come alongside the outdoor installations of Bansky and D*Face.

An Urban Regeneration at the human scale. Despite the outstanding city-initiated development projects and private investors’ programs that have totally regenerated this area, DTLV’s public space is still deficient in term of urban furniture. Our proposal aims to recreate different scales of agoras on empty lots to reactivate the public space throughout spontaneous meetings and reunions.

In order to do so, we’ve worked on very elementary and familiar geometrical shapes, timeless unity symbols such as circles and triangles.

The Open Circle. Three embedded circles are shifted in the same footprint. It allows a variety of uses and seating positions; alternatively, seat turns to be used as tier, stairs or backrest. The higher seats allows multiples views towards the city and the core of the cercle, while the lower parts connects directly to the inner center of the circle where spontaneous performances happens daily.

The Love Triangles. Three sets of triangles, each containing three shifted triangles creates a whole, a cosmogony, a tryptich where the voids in between are also inhabited. The built and the unbuilt parts create a balance where both become uses; the bar is related to high tiers and armrests, intermediary linear seats are open to the public space and other triangles, while the lower seats converge toward the center core of each triangle for more intimate chats.

An extension of the public space. The whole pallets are painted in green, not just because it’s a « Zero Tech » ecological intervention, but mostly because this project has to be a natural extension of the public lawn in order to facilitate the approach.

The roughness of those very old reused irregular palettes -along with a very clear design- creates a dichotomy between the used and the modern, the public space and the intimacy, the minimalism and yet the familiar appropriation ;

The sheen makes the project imperfect. It reduces the distance between the coldly designed furniture and creates a familiarity, a casualness toward the subject and the object; just like any other used good, an old car or a used pair of sneakers, the aim is to shrink the distance between the users and the design artefact.