Walking to the mall near me I counted nine benches. I thought that was a surprising amount, but according to experts, it is necessary for people who have difficulty walking and who regularly need to recover. As a 55-year-old man with a reasonable condition and certainly not with walking difficulties, I had never really paid attention to those benches, let alone ever taken a seat on them. I had only started to pay attention to it after a hiking holiday in the Austrian Alps.
During those walks I really looked forward to a bench after an hour or so. You can of course also sit on a rock or tree stump, but nothing beats a bench. A bench reminds the walker – even the healthy and fit ones – that you should take regular breaks. Without those breaks, and therefore without those benches, walking becomes a stepping, accelerating, or even a kind of fast walking. Then suddenly it’s all about speed or distance, in short about performance, while that’s not what it’s about when walking. Walking is about walking.
Walking is like swimming, I thought as I sat on a bench and puffed out. Just like swimming, it is not only a matter of ‘pull in, wide, close’, but above all also of ‘expelling’, as I once learned from the lifeguard. Without that exorcism, that swimming will never work, then it will continue to flounder. If the shoe fits, wear it, I then thought: after returning home from the holiday, I should sit down more often on the benches in our neighbourhood.
The difference between the hiking benches in the mountains and the street benches near me could hardly be greater. Here too, context is everything: the difference is not so much in the benches themselves, but in the environment. My neighborhood is difficult to interpret, but certainly not an alpine landscape. For the sake of convenience, I usually just say that I live in a suburb of L., while my neighborhood is strictly speaking within the municipal boundaries of the village of V.. Some would call it a kind of no man’s land, neither meat nor fish. You can also say that it unites the good of a village with the good of a city. A detour does not have to become a city stroll, nor a rural walk.
I immediately knew which bench it should be, a bench that I had already noticed, because it is in such a strange place: a central reservation, overlooking an intersection. Not really a spectacular view, but very suitable for anyone who can and wants to surrender to the wonder that sometimes, if all goes well, can arise from boredom. After musing and staring blankly into space for a while, I suddenly succeeded again to look, like a tourist. As if I were still on holiday: ‘If this were Ireland, I’d look closer’, wrote K. Schippers, the poet for whom nothing was more inspiring than a ride on the number 3 tram through Amsterdam and whose prose debut, An evening in Amsterdam, is all about the daily walk from the office to home.
When Schippers takes a closer look, you make the kind of discoveries that he describes in his poem ‘The Discovery’:
If you good to
you look around
do you see all that
colored
It was a bit uncomfortable to sit on the bench, at first it seemed like I was sitting on a spare bench, as if I was not participating and not counting. But soon I imagined myself in a box in a theater. At least I imagine that a theatergoer in such a box feels elevated above the teeming masses below; that’s how I felt on that street bench a bit elevated above all those others who hurry. “Don’t worry so much…”, you quickly think as a couch seater.
When I then ‘looked around carefully’ from that bench, I started to notice the different speeds of the different road users more and more. Most of the pedestrians I saw walking by kept the typical strolling pace: walking without rushing. The cyclists and especially motorists made a downright hectic impression.
My mind drifted to the writer WG Sebald, a walker so avid you could say he wrote with his feet. Sebald came to mind because we had been on holiday in the Allgäu Alps, near his home village of Wertach. To commemorate and honor him, a Sebald walking route was set out there in 2005, four years after his death. That route is approximately the walk that Sebald himself once took when, after years of absence, he reluctantly visited his native village again in 1987. He describes that visit and that walk in his debut, Dizziness, in the last story, ‘Il ritorno in patria’. As a small pilgrimage I of course made that, otherwise very nice walk – Wertach itself turned out to be exactly as godforsaken as you would expect after reading the story.
I am concerned here with an observation that Sebald (in the translation by Ria van Hengel) makes at the end of the story, during the return journey from Wertach to England, where he has lived and worked for decades. He crosses Southwest Germany by train.
‘Suddenly, when I looked outside, I noticed that there was hardly a person to be seen, although there were plenty of cars, shrouded in thick clouds of mist, whizzing over the wet roads.
Even on the streets of the cities there were far more cars than people. It seemed as if our species had already given way to another, or at least lived in a form of captivity.’
By the way, it is bitter that Sebald died in a car accident in 2001. Anyway, sitting on a bench and watching those cars rush by you can only agree with Sebald, it feels like you just escaped, stepped off the treadmill.
The bench is the archetype of street furniture, a strange, contradictory name for all those objects you find on the street. The strange thing is that ‘furniture’ comes from ‘mobile’, ‘moveable’: furniture is movable household goods, which, in contrast to the house and the land, can therefore be taken with you, they are movable goods. The street bench, on the other hand, is immovable street furniture – in fact it is better to speak of ‘immovable street property’.
Edwin Heathcote, the architectural critic of the Financial Timespoints out in a recently published book on street furniture, On The Street, also on the contrast between the immobile bench and the mobile walker. That book is actually about public space, street life. In particular about the ‘In-Between Architecture’ as he calls it in the subtitle. Heathcote, as it were, took a vacation as an architecture critic, because it is a book about the city, without it being about buildings.
This is also a relief for the reader. It’s about everything except buildings. It’s about everything between those buildings, everything that makes the space between those buildings livable, suitable for people. Street furniture such as the bench are not real furniture, in the sense that they make the space homely or even cozy and offer security. They make the street vacant, available. It’s the things that are always there for you. A street bench is always open.
The question of how comfortable a street bench should be is debatable. It must sit well, of course. So-called hostile architecture is out of the question, as Arjen van Veelen already extensively in NRC argued. He spoke of ‘evil benches’, which have been made unsuitable for sitting or lying on for long periods – to make life miserable for the homeless. That is indeed inhumane and barbaric. Yet comfort is not what a street sofa is all about, as it is with a real sofa. A street bench should not radiate comfort, but openness and freedom.
They clear the street. They are always there for you
Heathcote points out that street benches should have as little ‘appearance’ as possible, ‘design’ quickly ruins the bench. Benches make street life possible not so much by enlivening as by offering unobtrusive tranquility. A bench is a resting place in the bustle of the street, a place where you don’t have to do or consume anything, where you can laze or muse, hang out and chill, where you can just ‘be’ – you almost automatically become a philosopher of the street bench, you you start to wonder about existence.
Even when no one is sitting on it, the benches are still useful. For anyone passing by, on bike or car, it’s a reminder that there’s a life out there, that they can escape their ‘captivity’. There is an emergency exit, a pause button, which is always ready and very easy to press – you just have to take a seat.