“Much like a blank piece of paper or a very simple rectangular table, when you see Plains & Pods, what you’re seeing is its potential,” describes Sam Hecht, designer and co-founder of Industrial Facility. “And when you see something as potential, it means you can impart yourself on it. There’s no code to it—it’s a setting where life is played out.”

Rectilinear and architectural, Plains is comprised of large-format platforms and a trestle, varying in height and width to create customizable settings of layered seating and surfaces. “What makes me so passionate about solutions like Plains is that while they do read intuitively or subconsciously as benches, they also can come across as so much more,” says Landscape Forms Director of Design, Ryan Heiser. “Laying down, perching, sitting cross-legged, breaking down the division between ‘me space’ and ‘we space’—using Plains unlike a traditional bench feels much more natural because it’s not encoded with the same rules or expectations.” Constructed of naturally weathering wood, powdercoated metal, or a combination thereof, Plains are offered in three widths each with short and tall heights. Also incorporating optional metal backs and attaching side tables, this diversity of Plains modules creates installations with a level of detail only rivaled by custom solutions. Plains can branch, network, stair-step, overlap, crisscross, create runs and more to enable the full freedom of design in three dimensions.

Plains’ curvilinear counterpart, Pods, are seating and planters designed to be grouped together in multi-layered clusters of respite space and attractive greenery. Different groupings of Pods modules give users the opportunity to determine how they interact with space—from large and open communal zones, areas for privacy, single seating and quick individual touch-down points can scatter out to bring social and aesthetic depth to the landscape.

“This is one of those product systems that’s changing the narrative about how to use furniture in public space,” describes Landscape Forms Chief Innovation Officer, Kirt Martin. “We’re seeing a lot of demand for these interactive, multi-dimensional site furnishings in the custom sphere, but Pods is the first standard product in our portfolio that combines these ideas of layers and multiple use cases.” Rounded rectangles and squares ranging from individual to communal, Pods seating modules are crafted from bent and powdercoated sheet metal for their bases and naturally weathering wood caps for the seats. The Pods short planter modules mirror the shape and scale of the seats, while tall planter modules add height and a tiered effect to installations.

As fully-fledged product systems, both Plains & Pods individually bring depth, multi-functionality and user freedom to the landscape, but together their impact is magnified. Interplay between Plains’ crisp right angles and Pods’ friendly curves offer added aesthetic richness, and combination installations create a variety of opportunities for different social experiences. Different compositions of Plains & Pods go deeper into determining the social ambiance of space, seeing solo versus communal not as a binary, but as a continuum along which there can be many nodes for many different types of interaction—large groups, small groups, couples, solos wanting privacy, and solos wanting to interact with others sharing the space. "Together, these two products are all about layering space and experiences to create pockets of recognizable design DNA that are totally non-prescriptive,” says Ryan Heiser. "People can approach a Plains & Pods installation from 360-degrees and determine exactly how they want to use it."

In creating Plains & Pods, design studio Industrial Facility sought out Landscape Forms both for their precision in manufacturing and for their expertise in elegantly exercising restraint in design. "It takes a manufacturer like Landscape Forms that can do anything to be able to deliberately and confidently tell them not to,” says designer Sam Hecht. "To achieve what we want to achieve with very simple forms and curves is much more difficult because there’s no complication to hide behind.”