Tableware has always had a storage problem. A complete set of cups, bowls, and cutlery takes up a cabinet’s worth of space for the privilege of being used a few times a week. The rest of the time, it sits behind closed doors, out of sight and contributing nothing to the space around it. That’s a lot of material devoted to a fairly passive existence.

Michael Jantzen’s Art-ware prototype takes a different approach to the same set of objects. Rather than designing tableware that gets put away after a meal, he designed a system where the dishes, cups, and cutlery connect to each other and become something else entirely: freestanding abstract sculptures that live out in the open, doubling as décor when they’re not being used for eating and drinking.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

The key to the whole system is a set of male and female connectors molded directly into each piece. These are simple protrusions that stick out from the surfaces of the bowls, cups, and cutlery handles, allowing any component to plug into or stack onto any other. A bowl can lock onto a cup, a cup onto another cup, cutlery can stand upright in an opening or connect through a handle, and the whole assembly stays together without any separate hardware.

The configurations that result don’t look accidental. Cups stacked and plugged together form vertical columns; bowls assembled at various orientations create clusters that read as organic, almost biomorphic forms. Slide cutlery upright through the assembled pieces, and the resulting structure starts to resemble a piece of abstract art you’d find mounted in a gallery, not something you’d normally find next to a kitchen sink.

That’s precisely what Jantzen is after. The Art-ware set doesn’t need to be stored in a cabinet because the assembled form is meant to sit on a shelf or table as a decorative object, a sculpture that also happens to be a dining set. You pull it apart before a meal and reassemble it afterward in whatever configuration suits you that day. No two arrangements have to be the same.

The material is recyclable plastic, and Jantzen frames the concept in straightforward sustainability terms: one product that performs multiple functions uses fewer resources than two separate products doing the same jobs independently. There’s no dedicated storage unit needed, no extra display piece required. The dining set is the décor, and the décor is the dining set.

Art-ware is a prototype and the first in a planned series of designs that expand the idea further. The concept is broad enough to go well beyond tableware, and Jantzen has spent decades applying this kind of thinking to furniture, architecture, and public installations. The dining set is a compact version of the same logic: objects that commit fully to their function while quietly doing something else on the side.

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Most public art earns its place on a pedestal and stays there. It asks you to look, maybe photograph it, and walk away. The relationship between viewer and work rarely extends beyond that brief transaction. That’s been the convention for a long time, but there’s a growing push for installations that don’t just occupy public space but actually do something within it.

Michael Jantzen has been exploring that tension for years. His Moving Furniture series applies a simple idea to ordinary chairs and tables: take each object’s form and repeat it in progressive intervals as if capturing it mid-movement, then connect those moments into a single piece. The result is something you can still sit in or set a drink on, even if it no longer looks quite built for that.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

Monumental Moving Furniture takes that same concept into architectural territory. Built from painted steel, the series consists of abstracted chair and table forms, each generated by moving the original object through space and time and locking its path into a chain of connected segments. At this scale, what started as a reference to everyday objects feels closer to a building than a piece of furniture.

The method behind each piece is consistent. A chair or table is set in motion through space and time, with each interval frozen and joined to the next. Some pieces move only part of the original form; others shift the whole thing. The result is a structure that stops belonging to any single discipline and starts reading as furniture, sculpture, and architecture at once.

Despite being too large to sit in, these sculptures aren’t purely decorative. Each is large enough to walk under and through, giving it a practical function as a pavilion and shelter. That’s not something most public art can claim. Instead of asking people to observe from a polite distance, these structures pull you in, turning a passive encounter into something more physical and immediate.

The series covers both chair forms and table forms, each treated with the same sequential abstraction. Individual pieces have also been grouped into configurations that suggest more complex structures, as if each were a building block for something larger. Painted in vivid, solid colors like white, orange, and yellow, each structure commands attention from a distance and rewards a closer look once you’re standing beneath it.

Public spaces deserve more than objects to look at. They deserve things to experience. Monumental Moving Furniture earns its place on both counts, offering structures large enough to shelter visitors while giving them something genuinely puzzling to engage with. These forms don’t demand reverence. They invite curiosity, exploration, and the kind of slow, circling attention that good public space has always been designed to encourage.

The post These Steel Chairs Are Too Big to Sit In: Walk Through Them Instead first appeared on Yanko Design.

Most garden structures ask one thing of you: sit still and enjoy the shade. A pergola is a pergola, a gazebo is a gazebo, and neither one particularly cares what the afternoon light is doing. Michael Jantzen’s Interactive Garden Pavilion operates on a different premise entirely, one where the occupant has as much say over the structure as the designer did.

Built from sustainably grown stained wood and painted a uniform forest green, the pavilion sits on an octagonal support frame fitted with 30 slatted hinged panels across its walls and roof. Each panel pivots independently, sliding and rotating along the frame before locking into position. Open them wide on a hot afternoon, and the interior breathes. Angle them down against the glare, and the space dims considerably.

Designer: Jantzen

That last point is where the design earns its name. Most adjustable outdoor structures offer a single variable, usually an awning or a retractable canopy, within an otherwise fixed form. Here, the entire skin of the building is the variable. The wall panels, roof panels, and ground-level platform extensions can all be repositioned, which means the pavilion can look substantially different from one afternoon to the next.

Pull the panels shut on three sides, and the structure becomes a genuinely private enclosure. Splay them open, and the interior connects fully to the garden around it. In one arrangement, it reads as a dense closed form. In another, the structure opens up entirely, and the slatted framework becomes almost sculptural against the lawn.

Inside, two benches with adjustable backrests run the length of the interior, facing each other. The seating is built into the frame, which keeps the floor plan clean and leaves room to recline fully. When the overhead panels are partially open, sunlight enters in sharp parallel bands that shift across the benches as the day moves, a quality that is either meditative or distracting depending on what you came in for.

The construction logic is also notably practical. The pavilion is a prefabricated modular system, so the components can be scaled before assembly or joined with additional units to form a larger cluster. No foundation is required in most configurations. Given its size and type, a building permit is unlikely to be needed in many jurisdictions, which removes one of the more tedious barriers between an interesting design and an actual garden.

Jantzen has spent decades proposing architecture that responds dynamically to its occupants, much of it remaining on paper. This pavilion is one of the cases where the idea got built, and the result holds up at close range. The slatted wood is honest about what it is, the green paint ties the structure to the garden without trying to disappear into it, and the hinge mechanism does exactly what it promises.

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