- Prototyping Publicness -

This is neither a fixed bench nor an enclosed pavilion—it is a device for forging relationships.

Rather than asserting itself as a permanent structure within the city, it is a temporary construct that mediates behaviors and conversations.

Designed as a public device—a tool that operates at a scale beyond a product, yet not quite furniture—it serves to open space and activate encounters.

Hannah Arendt defined public space as“a place where individuals appear to one another, share the world, and create meaning through action.”¹

Richard Sennett, in turn, described the decline of publicness in modern cities as a process in which contingency and friction with others are gradually eliminated, arguing for the importance of reclaiming more open and relational forms of urban life.²

This tool functions precisely as a small anomaly within such urban structures—a presence that subtly disturbs the norm.

The circular table and parasol at its center are not merely for shade or dining; they generate a point of spatial convergence—an intersection of gazes, a quiet social geometry.To remove one’s shoes and sit on the mat is to engage in a small but significant ritual, producing an alternative ground level within the city—one that shifts the pace of time and scale of the body, reawakening a sense of co-presence.

In today’s urban environment, where public space is increasingly regulated, and lingering or spontaneous encounters are often controlled, the tool enables the regeneration of places of being precisely because of its temporary and mobile nature.

By prioritizing relationship over permanence, this is not a building, but a phenomenon—a spatial experiment that redefines the contours of architecture and gestures toward the future of publicness.

¹ Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958.² Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 1977.