The DeYoung Museum and the California Academy of Sciences are sit together in Golden Gate park and are incredible feats of contemporary architecture.  Beautiful and strikingly bold, these brand-spanking new buildings are surrounded by a lack luster environment to say the least.  With such incredible architecture, a serious update to the furniture and landscaping is very necessary.  My hope is to give the plaza pieces, and an environment, worthy of the buildings they sit between.

Groups - San Francisco is such an accepting and progressive city, I was most surprised to see the lack of group friendly seating at the park.  I feel that could give the park a better sense on community much like the rest of the city has done with communal tables in restaurants.  Therefore, beyond the aesthetic inspiration, I wanted to bring that communal element to the pieces.

Architecture - For me, the most compelling part of Golden Gate Park is the architecture of the DeYoung and the California Academy.  They sit across a plaza from each other and the furniture and surroundings are old, uncomfortable, uninteresting and falling apart in some cases.  I hope to incorporate and draw inspiration from the rich textures and unique features of these buildings. 

People Will Sit on Anything - One of the most important observations I made was that people were sitting on anything and everything at the park.  It didn't matter if it was grass, concrete, stairs or the base for a statue, people were sitting on it. 

There once was a time when public spaces, personal comfort and site furniture was essential to life.  A time that has long been forgotten in the pages of history.

Upon witnessing the horror that was the dilapidated and unimaginative furniture in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, Furnicus, the Greek God of furniture, cast stones down upon Earth in a furious rage. The stones came to rest creating a serene and beautiful garden of stones*

*factitious event

This was a story I created to give myself and the project a tag line to follow.  There may not have been a Greek God that oversaw furniture but if there were, he'd be quite sad at what is provided in Golden Gate Park.

To achieve that sense of community I was looking for, I decided IMPACT needed to be a set of pieces, arranged in clusters, throughout the space.  This would lend itself to gatherings of families, friends and hopefully bring groups of people together to share the experience of this location of the park.