HABITABLE FURNITURE



ISSUE
25’



Urban Salon is a modular and transformable furniture system designed to bring the intimacy of home into public urban spaces.

RESEARCHER & THINKER + DESIGNER + MAKER


We investigated how interior architecture principles can reshape the city through joy, intergenerational play, and ergonomic design. Emphasizing adaptability and sustainability, we challenged traditional ideas of public furniture.

Our collaborative work reimagined an open urban area in Houston as an inviting and dynamic gathering place. Guided by the visions of Aldo van Eyck, Laurie Olin, Izaskun Chinchilla, and William Whyte, we created a prototype that merges technical precision with playful, human-centered design. The result is an interactive, community-focused installation—welcoming people of all ages to rest, play, and connect.

Through research, material experimentation, and professional engagement, we brought our ideas to life at full scale. Dive into each student project and explore the complete studio magazine in PDF format for a closer look at the process and outcomes.




OUR TEAM

Ameen Hindi               Richard Sarmiento
Hunter Jenkins            Nesiah Neves
Vi Nguyen                 Daniela Contreras
Raul Vela                 Neha Kulkarni
Alaa Allaou               Pamela Posadas
Luke Hart                 Abby Winter
Leanna Landry             Jordan Phillip
Payton Bessent


TA
Richele Refuerzo




ISSUE 24’
Release.     May 21, 2024


HABITABLE Furniture is a reconfigurable system of mobile elements, serving as both a flexible display and space-making solution.

JOY + ERGONOMICS + TRANSFORMABLE


We explored how design can enhance daily lives and activities, focusing on transformation and responsiveness to optimize space functionally and qualitatively. Joy and ergonomics were our primary goals.

Our collaborative project transformed a residual space in the UHCoAD into a joyful and versatile IA student lounge. Through teamwork, innovation, and a focus on ecological responsibility, we created a multifunctional furniture system. This system allows users to personalize their space for work, relaxation, and collaboration, combining advanced materials, recyclability, and playful design elements. The final prototype embodies playfulness, innovation, and user-centric design, inviting a closer look at diverse interactions within the space.

Visit each project page, including the complete magazines in PDF format, for insights into our process and results. Enjoy the journey!


OUR TEAM

Richele Refuerzo        Jesus Aquirre
Victoria Gonzalez       Alex Baltazar
Paul Chavarria          Whitney Lau
Jade Guerra             Virginia Briagas
Elena Mexicano          Thuc Tran
Mikayla Zientek         Marshall Bradley
Nicole Valdes


TA
Lene Fourie

PROFESSOR

Marta Rodriguez
Ph.D. Architect

Marta Rodriguez's architectural journey spans continents, from Madrid to Tokyo and back to Paris, and now Houston, where she teaches and practices with a passion for creating inclusive, sustainable spaces. Her expertise in small-scale living and human-scale urban design is showcased through her award-winning projects and research-driven approach. Through her firm HABITABLE Studio and her advocacy in the Habitable City journal, Marta seeks a more connected, equitable, and livable built environment, embodying a vision of architecture that is adaptable.
   

OUR COLLEGE

Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design
UNIVERSITY of HOUSTON



ISSUE
25’ 

Release.     April 25, 2025


URBAN SALON


 Tied to the broader vision of the Urban Salon, this studio invited students to reimagine public space as a place of comfort, creativity, and connection. Each project responded to the challenge of designing versatile urban furniture that enables people to rest, play, work, create, and socialize—transforming the city into an extension of the home.

Focusing on adaptability, transformability, and ergonomic comfort, students used sustainable materials like recyclables and biodegradables to shape both form and function. Through thoughtful applications of scale, color, and pattern, the projects aimed to foster inclusivity and accessibility, making open spaces more inviting for all.

Together, these installations embody the spirit of the Urban Salon: public environments redefined by care, flexibility, and joyful interaction.







PROJECTS


01 URBAN DISTORTION


In Urban Distortion, a student reimagines Diego Rivera’s mural Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central through a kinetic bamboo pavilion installed in Mexico City’s Alameda Central. The structure uses mirrors and flexible forms to reinterpret Rivera’s realism as a dynamic, cubist landscape of memory. Made with local fabrics and shaped by puppetry traditions, the pavilion responds to community interaction—shifting with each use and redefining what it means for architecture to be public, playful, and alive.

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02 LIVING LATTICE


The Lattice proposes a living pavilion as a biodiversity prosthesis for the city. Inspired by garden trellises and historic gathering structures, it uses cable systems and climbing plants to create shaded, evolving environments. The design merges with trees and urban greenery, offering a seasonal, sensory-rich space for gathering, resting, and coexisting with nature.

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03 URBAN SENSUALITY


Among the studio proposals, Urban Sensuality explores how web-like structures made from biodegradable mycelium can activate underused plazas in Houston. Designed to wrap around isolated trees and abandoned corners, the intervention encourages sensory play and physical awareness through simple, reimagined games inspired by the 1980s. “We feel like animals,” one participant notes—a reminder of how bodily engagement can revive connection in the urban realm. The structure is designed to grow, evolve, and eventually decompose—blurring the line between architecture and living matter.

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04 THE HUGGING WALL


The Hugging Wall is a project that reinterprets Shigeru Ban’s temporary paper architecture, layering it with weaving art to create a foldable structure that hugs and encloses. It forms soft, intimate rooms within public space—offering privacy without exclusion. By changing the scale of the city, it introduces a more domestic, human-centered spatial experience. Like taking an umbrella and towel to the beach, one can carry this wall to shape a personal refuge—transforming urban space into something both mobile and emotionally resonant.

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05 WANTED SOUND


Wanted Sound creates a Promenade of Public Orchestras, turning sidewalks into musical instruments played by both people and the weather. As pedestrians move through downtown Houston, each step becomes a sensorial experience—a choreography of rhythm, resonance, and surprise.

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ISSUE
24’

Release.     May 21, 2024



THE PLAYSET








Located in the second floor of the Coad, the site sits between both studios and offices. Previosuly, this
area has been overlooked due to its dullness and lack
of comfortability for users to utilize for studying or leisure. When approaching this project, each team adhered to the semester's focus of joy, ergonomics,
and transformability. Resulting in projects that explored different concepts and approaches.


These projects aim to provide a fun, interactive environment that exemplifies the composition of space through versatile furniture systems that challenge the contemporary narrative of static space.







PROJECTS


01 INFLATABLES


Aimed to craft a vibrant and interactive piece that doubles as a versatile furniture system, these inflatable pieces aim to blend fun and functional. Integrating origami principles, each piece mimics the structureability of paper with it’s geometric shapes and edges while optimizing the properties of inflabtables.


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02 WALLPAPER


Our multi-functional wallpaper-screen aspires to integrate the elegance of wallpaper with the practicality of a folding screen. Keeping in mind the students of the COAD, we designed the panels to include rotating hinges, folding tables, and display/pin-up sections to meet their needs when in use.


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03 WEB


“Body Mods” is one of the five projects within HABITABLE Furniture. With its dedication to transform flexible and comfortable fabrics into pieces of human leisure and storage spaces, we developed moments within the space that uses webbing attributes to make them mulit-functional.


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04 LANDSCAPE


Outside In is one of five projects included in the proposal for Hines College to construct this summer. The goal of this subproject is to challenge the normal idea of seating and lounging, and to revitalize comfort by bringing in something bouncy and transformable to the body.


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05 CURTAIN


The Belly Curtains are one of the five projects for the Interior Architecture second-year program, which aims to achieve movement, connection, and disappearance. To create your own desired space for relaxation, intimacy, or an open space for gathering, the project offer the flexibility for a user to arrange and connect the curtains to create a desirable space.


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PLAY and MOVE the furniture

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