© 2008 Oliver Froome-Lewis & Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
The city deploys benchspaces at locations where they might provide rest or a pleasurable vantage point, although our public behaviours have moved on, leaving the bench stranded, unattractive and unpopulated. As we rush through the city, we take in what the bench might offer without sitting down, hoping to experience virtual pleasure through association.
We partially appreciate the view, the scents in the air, the sounds made by nearby trees, the kind provision of a waste bin without actually stopping. But whilst we might appreciate these benchspace offers remotely, we fail to experience the primary, perhaps secret, function of un-programmed activity. Benchspace is where we submit ourselves to the city, to watch and be watched, and to filter out half the city behind us.
Falling outside our daily plans the bench tempts unplanned contemplation of our surroundings and /or ourselves. It’s a temptation that implies the luxury of time.
If benchspace offered experiences that could only be revealed by sitting down, then our curiosity might draw us to surrender to the temptation of the bench. While such an enabling device or intervention added to a benchspace will achieve direct responses, it also serves to bring the bench into casual use in the manner originally intended, and challenges the way we perceive these small moments of public life/space.Interventions range between transient actions that encourage momentarily increased social activity to permanent reinterpretation and reconstruction of sites with programmed hourly, daily and seasonal events.
Transient interventions are economic and effective ways to heighten our expectations of benchspace, the same physical material can be deployed at a variety of sites in rotation generating engagement and challenging the way we interact with the city at these moments.
Such interventions cannot draw fully on the specific characteristics or opportunities of individual locations. Transient installations related to specific sites or recurring benchspace typologies are another possibility. Temporary interventions might be perceived as operating within the realms, and limits, of Fine Art and Performance.
These interventions influence perception of the quality of transient human experiences delivered by the metropolis, and hint at the effects that permanent installations might seek to achieve. By activating public perceptions of the spaces, they could point to ways in which permanent intervention might be received.
Improving perception of transient experience in public space is valuable and might adjust public expectations; it does not improve perceptions of what the permanent environment has to offer.
The population is less sensitised to this: whilst it might arouse little expressed opinion it registers on a subliminal scale and is stored in the brain under the ‘permanent qualities of my city’.
Benchspace can be used to initiate relevant, contemporary and permanent readings of the city adding to value attributed to ‘the permanent qualities of my city’.
