Design by: Albert Viaplana & Helio Piñón

The cast stone TEST-E planter has a striking oval shape, sharpened at each end to lighten its presence in alignments. The texture of its flanks includes diagonal linear grooves that reduce the apparent weight of the cast stone while at the same time acting as a transition to the verticality of the plants growing in it. TEST-E can be supplied in two dimensions, either 1.2 or 2 metres long.

By installing several aligned modules of this planter, it can be used as a vegetated boundary between roads and pavements to obviate the need for bollards or pivots. Architects Albert Viaplana & Helio Piñón tackled this function in the design of TEST-E in 1998 in conjunction with Escofet for pavement edges in Barcelona's Eixample District.

This street furniture is part of the A-E-I-O-U VOCABULARY COLLECTION.

The composition of these names implicitly contains the idea of creating a new vocabulary of components for Architects, the letter A in the series, to use in the modern city. The designers explain that each item is an individual response to the same issue: the confrontation between the neutral gravity of fluid concrete and the potential tension when it is adapted to different purposes.

Through its profile, BANC-U expresses the contrast of gravity on it's base against the levity of it's cross section; the LLUM-I sits on the ground and grows with the flow of artificial light until it finally falls to the ground; GAT-O is perhaps the best expression of the struggle between these two opposite forces: a mass of stone emerges from the ground, curving like a cat's back in a defensive posture; and TEST-E narrows until it loses its sense of dimension, marking the space like a small boat full of plants or flowers.