Habitable Furniture

HABITABLE FURNITURE

ISSUE 25’

Release. April 25, 2025

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. April 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

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.

TA
Lene Fourie

OUR COLLEGE

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

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

02 LIVING LATTICE

03 URBAN SENSUALITY

04 THE HUGGING WALL

05 WANTED SOUND

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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