Found via Architizer, the goal of Oliver Show's project is to provide a series of guerrilla public seating areas using Hamburg's existing urban infrastructure. He uses yellow drainage pipes, which are low-cost, weather-resistant and highly-flexable to turn bridge trusses into recliners, bike racks into loungers, and safety rails into sofas. The bright yellow color is suppose to bring attention to the commercialization of the city's public space.
The interventionist and experimental approach to me is more important than the quest for a "perfect" product. -- Oliver Show tells Der Spiegel
Architizer ends by describing the piece:
Show’s Street Furniture presents itself as a tool, an empowering design concept that has been almost effortlessly realized. The emphatically lackluster nature of his material draws attention to the resourcefulness of its application. His squishy yellow pipes tactfully reclaim public space for the public.
My comments here are not to detract from Olvier Show's work but rather my own study of the subject at hand. I believe this project is a good candidate for "Out of place goggles" analysis because it does look a little out of place. First, the color, part of aesthetics. It does seem to brighten up the photograph's depiction of a cloudy Hamburg day. The texture and the flexible sagging of the tubing gives its true identity away. The use of the tube in this context suggest a temporary installation but not intended to immediately disappear. It also suggests a little bit of "fun" factor. Another perception of this tubing is its inexpensive (?) nature… also suggesting a quick, temporary solution. As for the intention of reclaiming public space for the public… well, I'm not sure if that needed to be solved as there were no occupiers per se, but it seems the intention is to create public seating, then from a material perspective, it is somewhat successful.