Does the same childlike awe and sense of infinite possibility you felt when looking at pop-up books as a kid translate to adult-sized versions of pop-up furniture, rooms and even entire houses today? These transforming objects dramatically expand from a flat package just by pulling on one end, revealing themselves to be surprisingly strong and usable three-dimensional objects.

Pop-Up Interactive Apartment

This ‘pop-up interactive apartment’ by students at TU Delft adapts to inhabitants’ needs by constantly changing functions, bending and sliding folding polypropylene panels to offer chairs, beds, desks and other furniture or fold up out of the way. The result is an apartment that transforms to use a single room for many functions, without requiring any physical effort on behalf of the people who use the space.

Folding Flat-Pack M.A.Di House

This flat-pack house comes in a folded sheet with connected roof panels that pop up into an A-frame with the help of a crane. Once the easy-to-transport 5-foot-tall package is onsite, it takes less than a day to install, and it comes in several different sizes from a 495-square-foot studio to a 904-square-foot family home. The profile and hinges are made of steel, while much of the rest of the home is made of strong and durable cross-laminated timber (CLT) making the whole structure earthquake-resistant.

De-Dimension Furniture by Jongha Choi

Take this two-dimensional geometric wall art down, unfold it in one swift motion, place it on the floor and you’ve got a piece of furniture. ‘De-Dimension’ is a series of pop-up flat-pack furniture by designer Jongha Choi representing his ideas about perspective. “If our perception of an object is not different on a plane image and an actual subject, isn’t it possible to substitute the two with each other?”

Pop-Up Shelf by Meike Harde

How much bookcase do you really need? Maybe you could use a full-height storage piece, or maybe you want it to be shorter to fit beneath a window. German designer Meike Harde’s ‘Stockwerk’ shelf comes as a flat-pack item and easily expands without the need for tools, with pieces that fit together like a puzzle.

Slinky-Style Accordion Chairs That Stretch and Bend

Like a slinky, the Flexible Love Sofa and Chair start out tightly packed into a small package and then expand to surprising lengths when you pull on either end. The furniture series is made from 100% recycled paper, yet the sofa can hold up to 4,232 pounds when fully expanded, and snap back to a mere 5 inches in width when contracted.

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The typical desk design has remained the same for centuries, but we need these surfaces to do more – like incorporate our gadgets, offer privacy in loud offices, fit into our homes, fold up to take on the go or offer proper space for our cat overlords. Maybe even all of these things at once.  These designs are more than just a flat slab on legs, adapting to 21st century standards in all sorts of different ways.

Turia Table by Maxime Mellot Incorporates Nature

“Can we admire nature and put it in a cage?” says Maxime Mellot of his own design, this curious desk inspired by a park in the city of Valencia, Spain. “Turia participates in the debate, and forces the user to divert his attention, from his own person to live animals, requiring care and benevolence. In a society focused on performance and permanent connection to the internet, pure moments of privacy become rare and precious. But how can furniture invite us to take a break, drink a tea or have a snack and help us to enjoy this specific disconnected moment? My project tends to merge the universe of nature and relaxation, by combining iconic items such as bird cage and fish tank in an interactive way.”

Koloro-Desk by Torafu Architects

The interior of the Koloro-desk by Torafu Architects is like a cheerful miniature house with its very own operable windows, so you can lean inside to read, work, sketch or nap and feel a sense of disconnection from the world just outside its little walls. The two flip-out windows on either side offer shelves for drinks and other objects, and there’s even a skylight.

Oxymoron Desk by Anna Lotova

Shove stationery, pens and other item between the two little cushions under the surface of Anna Lotova’s Oxymoron Desk. The name comes from the unlikely pairing of materials. The cushion sandwich even lets you slide a piece of plywood inside to create a side table.

“We have to change our behavior, plan and think of work with a different mindset: no matter where an office is situated, it has to have a space it can call its own, identifiable, alterable, on a human scale, with its own history and objects, an enjoyable environment,” says Lotova.

CATable by Hao Ruan

Do you have a persistent feline companion who gets a little jealous of your computer or books when you’re working? This clever table by Hao Ruan of LYCS Architecture doubles as cat furniture, with the underside full of comfy curving hollows and tunnels for your cat friend to hide in.

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What starts as a flat, stackable, highly portable package expands more than ten times its original size when you pull on either end, bending and curling to become a sofa for a group. The Flexible Love Sofa and Chair are made from 100% recycled paper, yet they’re surprisingly strong, with the longer sofa holding up to 4,232 pounds at once when fully expanded. Designed in Taiwan, the series is available in ‘marble’ white, ‘lava’ black and ‘earth’ brown, and measures just over 5 inches across when collapsed.

The Flexible Love company shows off what the seats can do in a series of videos, so you can see it in action. It looks remarkably easy to manipulate, and somehow stays in place when you curl it into an S-shape or bend one end to the ground. If you’re skeptical that it can really hold as much weight as the company claims when expanded to its full 30-foot width, they’ve provided several images in which a group of people all stand on the seat at once.

With furniture like this, you’d never need to worry about accommodating extra guests again. It’s fun to see the different ways in which it can be arranged around tables. Each piece is hand-crafted of FSC-certified materials, assembly-free, recyclable and made with non-toxic finishing. Though the Flexible Love website is currently down for maintenance, you can purchase both the sofa and chair model at Expand Furniture in the meantime, with prices starting at $380.

Smart, well-designed urban seating encourages more interaction with the cities we live in and with each other, infusing them with vibrancy and a sense of connection. It’s even cooler when it’s built right into a park or sidewalk as a multifunctional element to add some sculptural visual interest, delineate different zones or offer opportunities for fitness and play.

Just a Black Box: Furniture Transforms Into Kiosk

A cube of semi-private seating by day, ‘Just a Black Box’ by Max Boano and Jonas Prismontas transforms into a kiosk for commercial or public use at night (or whenever else it’s desired.) The box elevates itself on its own hidden hydraulic columns to become a customizable space that can be used for retail, cafes, bike repair, selling tickets or even as a mini theater.

3 Urban Hammock Installations

Comfy hammocks come to public spaces in various forms to create some of the most nap-worthy urban furniture you’ll ever see, including a series of nets strung over the grass by The Chartered Institute of Housing, bright blue hammocks inserted into a void in a promenade along Paprocany Lake in Poland, and re-purposed fire hoses hung from a steel grid in Copenhagen.

Vanke Cloud City by Lab D+H

Vanke Cloud City is a mixed-use development project in Guangzhou, China boasting a series of creative public seating strategies by Lab D+H. The Cloud Line is a continuous tubular steel structure offering benches, monkey bars, parallel bars and other uses, while Cloud Seat is a modular set of interacted spaces made of perforated steel plate, with vertically stacked seating.

Meeting Bowls for NYC

Small groups can get together and chat face-to-face in a comfortable, breezy space with ‘Meeting Bowls’ by the Madrid-based design firm mmmm… in partnership with the Times Square Alliance. The urban furniture installation was situated in the center of Manhattan’s busiest plaza in summer 2011to facilitate interactions and dialogue between friends and strangers alike. The base of each bowl gently rocks to imitate the sensation of floating.

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The City Is Your Living Room 15 Modern Street Furniture Designs

More than just a surface to sit on, these modern chair designs are (sometimes literally) works of art, sculptural yet functional, from a flat-looking canvas you can actually sit on to a series of chairs that slide inside each other, inception-style. Customize a chair’s look with removable graphic panels, hook two high-backed seats together to make a room-within-a-room, or scare your guests with hanging chairs that mimic beasts of the deep sea.

Monster Chairs Might Eat You

Rest inside the mouth of a sea beast, real or mythical, in this series of fun and frightening handmade chairs by Cape Town artist Porky Hefer.

A Painting You Can Sit In

Hung flat on a wall, these canvases look like nothing more than two-dimensional paintings. But pull them down, lean them against the wall and take a seat, and you’ll find that they are surprisingly up to the task. These lightweight furniture pieces by YOY design studio are made of wood, aluminum and stretched elastic canvas.

Home Office in a Chair

If you’re the type who works from home but isn’t into sitting at a conventional desk, the Four Works Armchair can meet all of your needs. A seat is embedded within a bookcase-like base that also offers a light, cupholder, power outlets, storage and a laptop platform.

Inception Chair

Ten interlocking chairs ranging from adult to child size fit within a single frame in this chair by Vivian Chiu, inspired by the dream-within-a-dream concept of the movie Inception.

Rhinoceros Beetle Chair

Adding to a collection of realistic animal-shaped chairs rendered in matte black, Maximo Riera presents The Beetle Chair, which is only recognizable as furniture when viewed from the back.

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