Public benches, a political choice

Mario Girard tells two stories about street benches. Paris’s mayor wanted to replace the classic Banc Davioud with something more comfortable and modern, and people got upset; the Montreal story is about designer Michel Dallaire getting upset that the city altered his bench design, shown in the story – both the original and the version changed by the city, which Dallaire calls mundane because the armrests were moved to the ends, like the vast majority of benches everywhere.

When Dallaire’s original design was first launched, some people found it hostile to the homeless, because the inserted armrests made it impossible to lie down. To my eye the design simply looks mildly hostile generally. It’s like an airplane seat. It doesn’t allow for two people, or someone with kids or a dog, to sit side by side, and makes an implicit assumption that everyone out and about is a solitary unit, which just isn’t so.

Dallaire has done some great stuff, like the Bixi bicycle. But his bench isn’t the masterpiece he thinks it is.