Big Barrow is a wheelbarrow stretched to 26 feet and planted with species that once grew around Lake Union Park in Seattle. Olson Kundig built it for the Block Party of the 2026 Seattle Design Festival, held in the park on 15 and 16 August, where it answered the festival theme, IN[FLUX], with a canopy of Pacific Northwest natives that can be rolled from place to place.
The project came out of the studio’s annual internal competition for the festival. Dowbuilt built it as general contractor, Ohashi donated the trees and RedBuilt supplied the wood and steel trusses that form its frame.
A small lake, a lost forest
Today the park is flat and open. However, the lake has a longer story. The Vashon glacier carved it, and the Duwamish called it the “small lake”. Its shores held marshland and a sprawling forest until the late 1800s, when industry moved in to serve a fast-growing city. Big Barrow hitches a fragment of that earlier landscape to a farm tool and parks it on the lawn.
In other words, the planting is there to be used as much as looked at. On a hot day the trees give shade, the shrubs and grasses give birds and bees somewhere to stop, and the decks give people a place to gather.
The wheelbarrow is one of our most humble and egalitarian tools, designed to give mobility to people. We scaled it up to a 26′ long wheelbarrow so that moving it becomes a communal effort, something that requires a tribe. At SDF, it carried a forest, a reminder of how much our cities can change with a little green space and the shade it gives.
Hanna Dean, Lead Designer, Olson Kundig
Trusses, nets and tractor wheels
The team built most of the structure off-site. Cedar plank decks sit on a pair of prefabricated trusses. Below them, mesh trays and cargo nets hold the soil and roots, and axles fitted with repurposed tractor wheels keep the whole thing mobile. Meanwhile, plywood stools set around it give visitors somewhere to sit.
Olson Kundig chose the species for their ties to local wildlife. A canopy of dogwood and vine maple feeds birds and grazing animals, while snowberry, tufted hairgrass and ferns host native butterflies and shelter small mammals.
Combining everyday components in an artful way is a throughline of our work at Olson Kundig. We asked ourselves how the installation could be something simple, immediately understood, and yet unexpected. Everything else came through solving the problem of making an extra-long, mobile installation with live trees overhead and an understory below.
Jeff Sandler, Lead Designer, Olson Kundig
Pushed together
Moving it takes many hands, and that is the point. Now that the festival is over, Big Barrow will move to another site in Seattle through a community partnership, serving as a mobile market in neighbourhoods with limited access to fresh food.
Big Barrow is ready to hold whatever we dream up next, as long as we push it together!
Hanna Dean
More on the festival at Seattle Design Festival.
Design: Olson Kundig / @olsonkundig
Photography: John Nakatsu, Hybrid3 Studios, David Alf, Hanna Dean
Location: Lake Union Park, South Lake Union, Seattle, United States
