Composed of approximately 400 simple wooden chairs arrayed and stacked in a sine wave surface, the ‘SEAT’ public pavilion, by E/B Office, is a recently completed winning entry for this year’s Flux Project in Freedom Park. Located in Atlanta, the chairs are drawn into an agitated vortex rising from the ground. Sitting is perhaps the most common condition from which we experience architecture. Whether we work, relax, watch, eat, sleep, or talk to each other, sitting is at the core of our relationship to buildings. Therefore, this project formalizes the transformation of chairs from detached useable objects into structural and spatial components of an ambiguously occupiable edifice. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Sitting enables the detached observation of our lives in space and time, whether it’s to look upon the buildings we inhabit, or look out from them, towards the cultural milieu that surrounds. Sitting enables a perception of the other and beyond opposite the inclusivity and interiority of our personal spaces that we carry with us. It conditions a cosmological covenant between one’s body and one’s place in architecture. It produces a body space continuum. Sitting structures our habitable spaces from within to without, determining the proportions of useable objects, forms, spaces, dimensions, and relationships in an unfolding sequence of architectonic layers.
