Benches at War

When you want a place to sit, but not for a very long time, you don’t sit in a chair—you sit on a bench. If sitting in a chair is like parking, sitting on a bench is like idling, between trips, keeping the engine running and ready. Unlike other types of seating, what we call benches are often placed outside, or inside in narrow, confined spaces like hallways and foyers. They often lack a back rest or upholstered cushioning. And they are often used for not only seating, but as platforms for laying or setting things. It’s almost as if you don’t exactly sit on a bench—you set yourself. 

To celebrate the eclecticism of our upcoming auction, which we’re playfully calling “Style Wars,” we use the humble bench to ask the question: who wore it better?

Is it the Bauhaus style, traces of which can be seen in Lot 1155’s angular end forms which betray its primitive construction? Or is it the Brutalism of Lot 1176, whose weathered rectangular parts showcase the woodiness of wood? Maybe one prefers the zinc-wrapped Industrial style of Lot 1223, or the classic farmhouse style of Lot 1222. The bench in Lot 1307 wears a Victorian style with its ornate cast iron decorations, Lot 1370 a slight Mid-Century flair of curved wood. The style of Lot 1361’s wood bench with folding metal legs might be called “Biergarten.” A bench in a church is such a commonly recognized subtype that it’s called a pew, and often comes with built-in spots for hymn books or other accessories, as in Lot 1417. But maybe the most classic bench is a locker room bench of Lot 1362, with central supports that would have been attached to a concrete floor.

What unites these different styles, so contrasting they almost seem at war with each other, is their creative variations on the basic concept of a bench, which isn’t quite a seat, nor a platform, but something in between. However, the idea of style being something violent is neatly embodied in another style of bench, the infamous Camden bench, designed to prevent unwanted behaviors like skateboarding and sleeping which its designers called “criminal and antisocial behavior.” Critics cite it as an example of “violent design” or “hostile architecture,” alluding to its effects on the homeless and other criminalized elements of a community. One critic even called the Camden bench an anti-object, "defined far more by what it is not than what it is.” Though one could argue that all benches have that quality of self-negation, making it still, in the end, very much a bench.