Street furniture is the term for all the different elements that make up public amenities including benches and chairs, drinking fountains, public toilets, telephone boxes, bus shelters, billboards, street lighting, and children’s play areas. They all form part of the services offered to city-dwellers to make their lives more comfortable.
It must be carefully planned at the design stage and carefully managed on a day-to-day basis. It contributes to a town’s identity and plays a role in town planning. Councils sometimes even get into “arms races” to show which of them offers its inhabitants the most harmonious and practical living space. Each new addition should be meticulously studied so as to ensure that amenities are user-friendly and that they meet requirements in terms of safety and accessibility.
In this context, designers, architects and manufacturers design urban amenities to aid city-dwellers in their everyday lives, while also encouraging them to get to know each other, to get information and to look at architectural space in a different way.
As it is subjected to all kinds of wear and tear, street furniture has to be built to last, robust and secure. It has to have finishes and coatings suited to various different constraints including anti-sticker, anti-graffiti and anti-bacterial coatings.
As in most other sectors, these amenities now have to take account of environmental concerns. Eco-design is about considering a product’s entire lifecycle, from the extraction of the raw materials to the end of its life.
It should also be stated that the production, installation and maintenance of street furniture all have to comply with regulations designed to guarantee their quality and safety to the people who use them. Some areas for which there are no standards yet, such as ergonomics, practicality and their suitability to their surroundings, would seem ideal areas for companies to develop innovative ideas about how street furniture could evolve in the future.

Brice Tual
Innovathèque

17 - 26 October 2008
www.interieur.be

Among all the companies who exhibit products and accessories related to furnishing and interior design, like every year, the Innovathèque regards some of the exhibitors at Intérieur 08 as especially interesting. They are generally involved in design such as material designers. Although each manufacturer chooses independently which products they will bring out by developing collections and innovative ideas, these materials provide a real source of inspiration and can be adapted to a great many different uses. As our job of “innovation detectives” requires, we did the rounds of Intérieur 08 to discover the new trends and prospects on display from manufacturers.                  

15-17 June 2008
www.neocon.com

This year’s annual American office furniture trade fair, NeoCon 2008, was a successful event in terms of the number of visitors. All in all, more than 1,200 showrooms received over 50,000 visitors.

05-09 September 2008
www.maison-objet.com

Clearly affected by the current nervy economic climate, this Paris show, which takes place at the end of the summer, remains a capital of international creativity and a driving force of economic growth. One year after it was introduced, the outdoor sector has already confirmed its importance.…

Street furniture forms a social and cultural link between the town centre and the suburbs, and is also a means of showcasing local expertise.

Batyline Canatex® is a textile that combines a polyester fibre (core) with a composite sheath made partly from hemp fibre cultivated in an environmentally responsible manner close to Ferrari’s production sites. This Batyline is completely recyclable thanks to the patented Texyloop® process. It is flexible, light, breathes (quick-drying), is easy to clean, antifungal, UV and fire resistant, and has a 2-year guarantee from the manufacturer. It has proved its robustness in tests for abrasion and at low and high temperatures. The product is available in 12 different formats, all of them 180 cm wide. The weaving can be done to order. It can be used for furniture, fittings and interior and exterior decorating.
www.ferrari-textiles.com

Intended for outdoor use, Nano is a leather-imitation, PVC-coated textile produced by Skai. It is easy to maintain, and resistant to UV, to temperatures between -30°C and +100°C, to saltwater and oil, and to abrasion. Nano is generally used as a covering for benches and seats on boats. This textile comes in several colours and finishes and is made of 2% Nano high-tech compound, 88% PVC and 10% PES textile. The raised effects are obtained by embossing (raising, stamping) and by printing. The material can also be fire-proofed and thermo-moulded, and is available in rolls that are 140 cm wide and 3,000 cm long. The material is 1-1.7 mm thick.
www.hornschuch.de

Tech-Wood® is a composite wood made up of 70% softwood fibres from wood-processing plants or forests that are certified by PEFC and 30% added polypropylene. Culled wood, timber damaged in storms and logs that have been rejected for use as regular timber are used to produce these fibres.
Various finishes are possible: original structure, paint, or sheet or laminate veneer. The surface of the product can be brushed using a wire-brushing device to give the surface an appearance similar to that of wood.
The manufacturing process involves first of all steam-drying the wood fibres using the chimney gases given off by the factory’s electrical generator. The wood fibres are then mixed in with the polypropylene at temperatures that can reach almost 200°C. The PP becomes liquid, covers the fibres and then cools to form a pellet. The extrusion process the company uses to mould the matter is called “pushtrusion”. The resulting profile is then fed into a cooling tub. This manufacturing process gives the product excellent properties: Tech-Wood® is shock-resistant, keeps its shape and doesn’t split.
Recyclable material, insensitive to UV rays.
Processing methods: routing, drilling, grooving, extrusion, injection.
www.tech-wood.com

RETIwood products are retified woods, i.e. they have been heat-treated at high temperatures up to 240°C using a patented technique called retification.
Woods used for outdoor joinery, bathroom floors and outdoor furniture are carefully selected, with only the best of each type of wood used, and then monitored from extraction to drying to ensure that they have the best possible mechanical resistance after processing.
The patented RETI-tech process makes the wood resistant to xylophagous insect attacks (except termites), improves its dimensional stability, alters its colour and allows it to develop a grey patina over time. The mechanical properties depend on the temperature at which the wood is treated.
RETI-tech favours the use of local types of PEFC-certified wood: ash, beech, spruce, pinaster, Norway pine, and poplar.
www.retiwood.com
 

TX active, a product developed by Ciments Calcia is a product based on the principle of photocatalysis, which is applied to cement used for construction.
Photocatalysis is a natural phenomenon by which a substance called a photocatalyser speeds up a chemical reaction through light without being affected itself. Using light energy, water and oxygen from the air, the photocatalysers cause extremely reactive molecules to form which are capable of decomposing certain organic and inorganic substances present in the atmosphere by oxidation-reduction. Photocatalysis therefore already exists in nature. The principle of photocatalysis has been applied for the last 10 years to various materials (glass, ceramic, cement binders) for its self-cleaning effect. Now, increasing pollution in urban areas has led the technical centre of the Italcimenti group to conduct research into applying the principle of photocatalysis to cement binders so as to reduce the levels of noxious substances such as NOx (a harmful gas half of whose emissions come from road traffic) in the atmosphere.
www.ciments-calcia.fr