Created in collaboration with industrial designer Jess Sorel, STRATA is an innovative family of benches and tables that, for nearly a decade, has defined modern high-profile outdoor spaces. Born out of design and material exploration, innovation, and juxtaposition, STRATA has naturally grown and evolved—and continues to do so—over its celebrated lifetime.

The initial STRATA benches and tables were the first products specifically designed to employ MeldStone™, Landscape Forms’ proprietary performance concrete, taking advantage of the material's capability for casting thin, strong forms that are structurally robust and heavy, while remaining almost impossibly light and delicate aesthetically.

Following these original offerings from the STRATA family came STRATA Beam, a selection of benches and a table that continues in this spirit of material exploration. "While the original STRATA is all cast concrete with a steel base, moving into STRATA Beam, we wanted to do something that mixed materials in an interesting way—exploring a different type of contrast, recognizing the inherent attributes of different materials, and using them to their greatest effect,” designer Sorel describes.

STRATA Beam introduced wood as a softer and warmer point of contrast to the cast concrete, using the contraposition of the two materials to accentuate the individual characters of each. "STRATA Beam came out of this question, ‘How do you represent the two distinct materials of concrete and wood in concert with one another, but also as contrasting elements doing different jobs?’” Sorel explains. "The wood became the mediator between these two heavier, colder and more sculptural anchor points.”

This year marks the introduction of the STRATA Beam family's third iteration, an expansion of the STRATA Beam bench that maintains its hallmark sense of contrast, but now opens up a new realm of modularity and adaptable functionality. The expansion enables STRATA Beam benches to join together using modular bridge legs and different angled connectors to offer unmatched creative freedom in crafting customized configurations. It’s a new vision for STRATA Beam that sees the bench not as a static, singular product, but as a dynamic suite of elements that enables designers to use STRATA Beam's compelling contrast and sculptural elegance as foundation for their own ideas.

“Suddenly, just by adding the ability to connect, there becomes so many different ways to shape and define outdoor spaces,” says Sorel. “Now you can turn a corner at 90 degrees, you can use the 45-degree connectors to create serpentine or zig-zag patterns, or you can make closed shapes to encircle a tree or accentuate a key feature."

"I’m also fascinated by how you can use different elements in the outdoors to create the gestalt of space,” Sorel continues. “If you have an area that previously didn’t have any definition, when you incorporate elements like STRATA Beam that are meandering throughout, suggesting or implying delineation, creating ‘spaces within spaces,’ it can really change the way we experience a location in powerful ways.”

In addition to STRATA Beam’s new sense of creative freedom and aptitude for defining space, Sorel returns to the idea of material juxtaposition for yet another intriguing gesture STRATA Beam’s expansion can create. He describes how material juxtaposition takes on new meaning in this scalable context—how contrast, when repeated at scale, becomes cadence. "The STRATA Beam expansion enables you to string together the two materials indefinitely while creating this wonderful cadence of color, texture, and emotion—wood then concrete, soft then hard, warm then cool, and so on,” says Sorel. “When you employ contrast within a singular object, it’s interesting. But when you start connecting these objects together, it amplifies this idea, creates rhythm, and almost verges on poetry.”