DesignSeattle · Festival over; moved to Issaquah
Studio Deng's climbable plywood horses at the Seattle Design Festival
An equestrian statue split into eight playful plywood doubles, two of which became a slide and an archway beside Lake Union.
Studio Deng started from a simple observation: the horse on an equestrian monument is a composite, shaped through endless revisions until the parts settle into one official figure. So the team took it apart again. The Flatland Horse imagines eight plywood horse 'doubles', each keeping one body part and taking on a public job, from bench, table and mirror to gate, slide and pavilion.
Two were built for the 2026 Seattle Design Festival at Lake Union Park. Gate Horse is an archway of separated plywood profiles, so you walk through the animal and catch the skyline in the gaps. Slide Horse works like a small bridge, with a deck spanning four leg frames between a staircase and a slide; the lowered head is the slide and the mane doubles as a side barrier. The detail you'd notice up close is the brown chenille stretched over a waffle of foam core, giving a leg or a mane a soft, touchable bulk against the flat birch plywood.
After the festival both pieces were unbolted, flat-packed and rebuilt in a courtyard in Issaquah, east of Seattle, though the article doesn't say which. The story came in as a reader submission from the studio itself. It's a nice one for anyone who likes public design that children are allowed to climb on.
Our summary of a story from designboom, published 8 October 2026. Read the original
Photos: designboom · See all 8
8 photos
From designboom