benchspace walk workshop

benchspace walk workshop

This Walk Workshop, organised by Touching the City, will take place in Southwark starting at the Tate Modern, on the afternoon of Saturday 12th July. We have invited designers and artists to adopt one of fourteen benchspaces along the route and to make proposals for transforming the public experience of those places. A series of four-minute intervention presentations will highlight the potential of benchspace, punctuate our journey and provide topics for discussion. We will conclude at a pleasant, secluded pub close to our starting point at 5.00pm.
Whilst the Mayor’s 100 Public Spaces, a schedule of sites across London marked for improvement, are small in comparison with the development in progress for the Olympics or London Thames Gateway, they remain large in comparison with the intimate, everyday spaces that are also available to us. Observing the private life of smaller public spaces we have focused on a special, unloved and unresolved realm between public and private space, which we call benchspace.

Touching the City is a design research unit led by Oliver Froome-Lewis and Daisy Ginsberg. We study such public realms, exploring our relationships with the unremarkable city spaces that we use and inhabit every day. We are interested in the physical and psychological space of the city and aim to challenge the existing urban environment. Our work questions, and makes a case for, the free will of the individual. We reflect on the interrelated circumstances that lead to the spontaneity or automaticity of the urban inhabitant and search for locations where people might be observed in a reflective state: these places exhibit special potential for the transformation of individual behaviors. We raise questions of locality and generality, of appropriate and inappropriate fantasy, of the triumph of utility over delight and, occasionally, of delight over utility. We encounter joyful spaces where our spirits take flight, compressive spaces where the weight of the human throng causes us to crave seclusion and melancholic spaces where we might become more contemplative or perhaps even overcome by nostalgia or depression.

Through the process of walking in a group, and inviting discussion and contemplation, we question and re-think the qualities of such spaces and consider potential alternative futures for them. This Walk Workshop focuses on how interventions might help to translocate generations of pale ‘simulation genre’ beings from sofa to bench. By stimulating such discussion we aim to throw open the public space debate and to move beyond the purely architectural or material.

1 Canvey Street
2 Perks Square
3 The Memorial Park
4 Guy Street Park
5 Kipling Estate
6 Tabard Gardens
7 Trinity Church Square
8 Newington Gardens
9 Elephant and Castle
10 Princess Street
11 St Georges Road
12 Imperial War Museum
13 Millennium Green Park
14 Chaplin Close

To reserve a place contact LFA08.
For more information contact: mail@touchingthecity.com

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