A former parking has become a Green Oasis in front of Poznan, Poland’s city hall, but beyond providing seating and greenery the redesign adds another key element: effectively endless flexibility.

Custom-created benches and planters (filled with an array of taller trees and shorter flora) create a system of mobile street furniture that can be configured in an infinite variety of ways.

Normally, independent islands allow small groups to gather. As needed, though, the benches can be matched up for anything from public speeches to in-the-round performances — the modular geometry of the 14 benches and 20 planters allows them to befit together like pieces of a puzzle.

Developed by Atelier Starzak Strebicki, this modular courtyard serves as a gathering space, open-air amphitheater or auditorium — the street furniture elements can also be moved out of the way entirely if the entire square is needed.

The seats are also doubled-up, allowing people to sit on a higher or lower tier (or both simultaneously for crowded events). At the same time, the furnishings are sufficiently heavy that no one need worry about someone walking (or rolling) away with them at the end of the evening.

These fairly simple but robust steel-and-wood designs provide a nice industrial-style contrast with their historic surroundings, and suggest another way of thinking about public furniture, one which allows it to serve different functions on demand.

A combination of walls on wheels and sliding wall panels make this modular home infinitely adaptable, able to transform from a spacious single-family abode to a series of divisible spaces for guests on demand.

PKMN Architectures deployed this solution as part of their ongoing Little Big Houses initiative (Pequeñas Grandes Casas), a series of designs addressing usability in small spaces.

This particular home in Mexico serves a couple but is also made to accommodate visits from extended family, able to support three bedrooms that can be added in less than a minute.

While there are intended ways of using the modular components, the real beauty of the system is in its versatility – hanging partitions and thicker structural-and-storage walls can be combined in all kinds of configurations.

From the architects: “María José y Enrique viven en México pero viajan mucho a Europa. Querían una segunda casa en Asturias que pudiera ser un apartamento para la pareja y para toda la familia al mismo tiempo. A través de unos muebles giratorios los dos dormitorios de la casa pueden aparecer y desaparecer en un minuto. La casa tiene así tres posiciones, una casa con dos dormitorios, con un dormitorio o sin ninguno de ellos. Así la vivienda se convierte en un lugar para celebrar una gran fiesta para los más pequeños o un espacio tipo loft cuando María José y Enrique están solos. Es el lujo de tener un salón de casi 50m2 en una casa de 70m2.”

A step beyond flip-down beds and foldaway furniture, this series of modular rooms packs whole kitchens, bedrooms and offices into a highly portable form, so much so that they be bought online at stores like Amazon Japan and shipped right to your door.

Consider the possibilities, too, for on-demand residential conversions: with these you can make anything, from a cargo container to an old warehouse, into an instant apartment.

Set on wheels and made narrow when closed, each room-in-a-box can be rolled easily through opening and navigate narrow corridors to arrive at its destination.

The bedroom unit is the largest – it uses central breakpoints to allow overhead lighting as well as the bed and its supports below to collapse in half then fold up or down into empty spaces in the shell.

The mid-sized office features interlocking solids and voids to maximize shelving and storage when open. Meanwhile, the wheeled chair below detaches from the primary structure on demand.

The small kitchen flips up and out to reveal a sink, work surface and hot plate at hip height with space for storage and refrigeration below.

Square footage is a serious commodity in cities like Tokyo and Kyoto, making the four-figure price tag for these units from Atelier OPA (dubbed Kenchikukagu) also a lot more palatable in the right urban context.

If you thought biking down stairs was hard, try skating a stairwell – or better yet: don’t. At least not without this nifty device, that is. Designed by Po-Chih Lai (movie by Juriaan Booij), this next-generation skateboard slots an extra set of wheels alongside the existing ones with a flexible chassis to bend from one step to the next.

But such ideas are hardly born and built overnight – the prototyping process is in many ways as fascinating as the final design product, including various multi-wheel attempts to maximum stability and broad functionality.

Its purpose? “The piece aims to expanding the capability and possibility of extreme sports as we understand them. Inherited from our natural instincts, sliding as children and snowboarding as adults, the focus is on one of the most influential and stimulating sports – skateboading, aiming to push the boundaries further.”

Its Context? “The sub-culture of graffiti, free-running, skateboarding, street dance, and extreme sports are now accepted and a valid and valuable influence on our generation.” In short, with all of these becoming both accepted and broadly accessible, one could say the Stair Rover provides training wheels for the less adept – perhaps at least saving a broken leg or two, here and there.

The machine is on display at this year’s Show RCA – its creator, a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art, hopes to expand the notion of skateboarding as well as the places that can be accessed by its practitioners  – hopefully, pedestrians will understand.