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This Chair Is A Plant

A new kind of park chair for Battery Park

The Project Scope

This Chair Is A Plant


This was our entry to The Battery Conservancy Americas “Draw Up A Chair” Design Competition. Our intention was to reduce, recycle and inspire.

Our ideas behind these chairs are simple. We wanted to create a chair that would be a continuos source of rejuvenation to the park. It is crafted from a combination of soil, seeds and beeswax to slowly spread love and peace throughout the park.

This is a natural cycle. Rain brings growth, rejuvenation and color. Once fertilized, the composite will grow new, beautiful plants around the Battery Green and beyond. The form of this chair is derived from human hands molding raw earth. We plan to allow children and families the opportunity to select their own ingredients at the conservancy during the mixing process. This will make every plant chair unique and create returning visitors, eager to see their flowers bloom.

The identical twin to this chair is its opposite. It is a permanent version made from recycled plastic bottles discarded from a single day in NYC. It is the exact same form as the chair made from soil, but is to be made permanent by using P.E.T. plastic collected from the waste treatment plant.

Manufacturing of the plant chair will be made with our unique blend of ingredients by local artisan craftsmen. Manufacturing of the plastic chair is made of injected molded P.E.T. in facilities ideally located next door to the recycling plant, where all of the water bottles end up.

This is a closed loop all within New York. Our trash becomes our chairs.

We are currently accepting development requests and are looking to team up with parks around the US and abroad so contact us if you’re interested.

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About the Battery Conservancy For nearly two decades, The Battery Conservancy has worked to transform the park from masses of cracked asphalt to waves of perennial gardens. New York’s birthplace park is being rebuilt to support Downtown’s role as the epicenter of commerce, an emerging work/live community, and a major tourist destination. The Battery Green begins construction in 2012 as part of a $18M reconstruction of The Battery perimeter. www.thebattery.org


Type furniture
Status prototype
Date 2013
Principal Brooks Atwood
Project Team Marguerite Lefevre, SeoYeon Jin, Jake Frey