Issue 14
DATE
STORY TYPE
AUTHOR
13
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
12.09.2024
Why Are Scott Burton’s Benches Disappearing?
by Mark Byrnes
13
BOOK REVIEW
11.25.2024
A Mind-Body Experience of Architecture, Delivered in a Photo
by Marianela D’Aprile
13
PERSPECTIVE
11.18.2024
Seeing Chinatown as a Readymade
by Philip Poon
13
PEOPLE
11.11.2024
The Place of the Handmade Artifact in a Tech-Obsessed Era
by Anne Quito
13
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
11.04.2024
How a Storied Printmaker Advances the Practice of Architecture
by Diana Budds
12
PEOPLE
10.21.2024
Sounding Out a Better Way to Build
by Jesse Dorris
12
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
10.07.2024
What It Means—and What It’s Worth—to Be “Light”
by Julie Lasky
12
PERSPECTIVE
09.23.2024
Redefining “Iconic” Architecture and Ideals
by Sophie Lovell
12
PERSPECTIVE
09.09.2024
Surrendering to What Is
by Marianne Krogh
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
08.26.2024
Sometimes, Democratic Design Doesn’t “Look” Like Anything
by Zach Mortice
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
08.19.2024
What Does Your Home Say About You?
by Shane Reiner-Roth
11
BOOK REVIEW
08.12.2024
Is Building Better Cities a Dream Within Reach?
by Michael Webb
11
PEOPLE
08.05.2024
The Value of Unbuilt Buildings
by George Kafka
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
07.29.2024
Future-Proofing a Home Where Water Is a Focus and a Thread
by Alexandra Lange
11
BOOK REVIEW
07.22.2024
Modernist Town, U.S.A.
by Ian Volner
11
PEOPLE
07.15.2024
Buildings That Grow from a Place
by Anthony Paletta
10
URBANISM
06.24.2024
What We Lose When a Historic Building Is Demolished
by Owen Hatherley
10
PERSPECTIVE
06.17.2024
We Need More Than Fewer, Better Things
by Deb Chachra
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
06.03.2024
An Ode to Garages
by Charlie Weak
10
PERSPECTIVE
05.28.2024
In Search of Domestic Kintsugi
by Edwin Heathcote
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
05.13.2024
The Perils of the Landscapes We Make
by Karrie Jacobs
10
PERSPECTIVE
05.06.2024
Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence
by Jarrett Fuller
9
PERSPECTIVE
04.29.2024
Why Can’t I Just Go Home?
by Eva Hagberg
9
PEOPLE
04.22.2024
Why Did Our Homes Stop Evolving?
by George Kafka
9
ROUNDTABLE
04.08.2024
Spaces Where the Body Is a Vital Force
by Tiffany Jow
9
BOOK REVIEW
04.01.2024
Tracing the Agency of Women as Users and Experts of Architecture
by Mimi Zeiger
9
PERSPECTIVE
03.25.2024
Are You Sitting in a Non-Place?
by Mzwakhe Ndlovu
9
ROUNDTABLE
03.11.2024
At Home, Connecting in Place
by Marianela D’Aprile
9
PEOPLE
03.04.2024
VALIE EXPORT’s Tactical Urbanism
by Alissa Walker
8
PERSPECTIVE
02.26.2024
What the “Whole Earth Catalog” Taught Me About Building Utopias
by Anjulie Rao
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
02.19.2024
How a Run-Down District in London Became a Model for Neighborhood Revitalization
by Ellen Peirson
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
02.12.2024
In Brooklyn, Housing That Defies the Status Quo
by Gideon Fink Shapiro
8
PERSPECTIVE
02.05.2024
That “Net-Zero” Home Is Probably Living a Lie
by Fred A. Bernstein
8
PERSPECTIVE
01.22.2024
The Virtue of Corporate Architecture Firms
by Kate Wagner
8
PERSPECTIVE
01.16.2024
How Infrastructure Shapes Us
by Deb Chachra
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
01.08.2024
The Defiance of Desire Lines
by Jim Stephenson
7
PEOPLE
12.18.2023
This House Is Related to You and to Your Nonhuman Relatives
by Sebastián López Cardozo
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
12.11.2023
What’s the Point of the Plus Pool?
by Ian Volner
7
BOOK REVIEW
12.04.2023
The Extraordinary Link Between Aerobics and Architecture
by Jarrett Fuller
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
11.27.2023
Architecture That Promotes Healing and Fortifies Us for Action
by Kathryn O’Rourke
7
PEOPLE
11.06.2023
How to Design for Experience
by Diana Budds
7
PEOPLE
10.30.2023
The Meaty Objects at Marta
by Jonathan Griffin
6
OBJECTS
10.23.2023
How Oliver Grabes Led Braun Back to Its Roots
by Marianela D’Aprile
6
URBANISM
10.16.2023
Can Adaptive Reuse Fuel Equitable Revitalization?
by Clayton Page Aldern
6
PERSPECTIVE
10.09.2023
What’s the Point of a Tiny Home?
by Mimi Zeiger
6
OBJECTS
10.02.2023
A Book Where Torn-Paper Blobs Convey Big Ideas
by Julie Lasky
6
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
09.24.2023
The Architecture of Doing Nothing
by Edwin Heathcote
6
BOOK REVIEW
09.18.2023
What the “Liebes Look” Says About Dorothy Liebes
by Debika Ray
6
PEOPLE
09.11.2023
Roy McMakin’s Overpowering Simplicity
by Eva Hagberg
6
OBJECTS
09.05.2023
Minimalism’s Specific Objecthood, Interpreted by Designers of Today
by Glenn Adamson
5
ROUNDTABLE
08.28.2023
How Joan Jonas and Eiko Otake Navigate Transition
by Siobhan Burke
5
OBJECTS
08.21.2023
The Future-Proofing Work of Design-Brand Archivists
by Adrian Madlener
5
URBANISM
08.14.2023
Can a Church Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis?
by Alex Bozikovic
5
PEOPLE
08.07.2023
In Search of Healing, Helen Cammock Confronts the Past
by Jesse Dorris
5
URBANISM
07.31.2023
What Dead Malls, Office Parks, and Big-Box Stores Can Do for Housing
by Ian Volner
5
PERSPECTIVE
07.24.2023
A Righteous Way to Solve “Wicked” Problems
by Susan Yelavich
5
OBJECTS
07.17.2023
Making a Mess, with a Higher Purpose
by Andrew Russeth
5
ROUNDTABLE
07.10.2023
How to Emerge from a Starchitect’s Shadow
by Cynthia Rosenfeld
4
PEOPLE
06.26.2023
There Is No One-Size-Fits-All in Architecture
by Marianela D’Aprile
4
PEOPLE
06.19.2023
How Time Shapes Amin Taha’s Unconventionally Handsome Buildings
by George Kafka
4
PEOPLE
06.12.2023
Seeing and Being Seen in JEB’s Radical Archive of Lesbian Photography
by Svetlana Kitto
4
PERSPECTIVE
06.05.2023
In Built Environments, Planting Where It Matters Most
by Karrie Jacobs
3
PERSPECTIVE
05.30.2023
On the Home Front, a Latine Aesthetic’s Ordinary Exuberance
by Anjulie Rao
3
PERSPECTIVE
05.21.2023
For a Selfie (and Enlightenment), Make a Pilgrimage to Bridge No. 3
by Alexandra Lange
3
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
05.08.2023
The Building Materials of the Future Might Be Growing in Your Backyard
by Marianna Janowicz
3
BOOK REVIEW
05.01.2023
Moving Beyond the “Fetishisation of the Forest”
by Edwin Heathcote
2
ROUNDTABLE
04.24.2023
Is Craft Still Synonymous with the Hand?
by Tiffany Jow
2
PEOPLE
04.17.2023
A Historian Debunks Myths About Lacemaking, On LaceTok and IRL
by Julie Lasky
2
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
04.10.2023
How AI Helps Architects Design, and Refine, Their Buildings
by Ian Volner
2
PEOPLE
04.03.2023
Merging Computer and Loom, a Septuagenarian Artist Weaves Her View of the World
by Francesca Perry
1
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
03.27.2023
Words That Impede Architecture, According to Reinier de Graaf
by Osman Can Yerebakan
1
PEOPLE
03.20.2023
Painting With Plaster, Monica Curiel Finds a Release
by Andrew Russeth
1
PERSPECTIVE
03.13.2023
Rules and Roles in Life, Love, and Architecture
by Eva Hagberg
1
Roundtable
03.06.2023
A Design Movement That Pushes Beyond Architecture’s Limitations
by Tiffany Jow
0
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
02.07.2023
To Improve the Future of Public Housing, This Architecture Firm Looks to the Past
by Ian Volner
0
OBJECTS
02.07.2023
The Radical Potential of “Prime Objects”
by Glenn Adamson
0
PEOPLE
02.20.2023
Xiyadie’s Queer Cosmos
by Xin Wang
0
PEOPLE
02.13.2023
How Michael J. Love’s Subversive Tap Dancing Steps Forward
by Jesse Dorris
0
SHOW AND TELL
02.07.2023
Finding Healing and Transformation Through Good Black Art
by Folasade Ologundudu
0
BOOK REVIEW
02.13.2023
How Stephen Burks “Future-Proofs” Craft
by Francesca Perry
0
ROUNDTABLE
02.27.2023
Making Use of End Users’ Indispensable Wisdom
by Tiffany Jow
0
PEOPLE
02.07.2023
The New Lessons Architect Steven Harris Learns from Driving Old Porsches
by Jonathan Schultz
0
PERSPECTIVE
02.07.2023
The Day Architecture Stopped
by Kate Wagner
0
OBJECTS
02.07.2023
The Overlooked Potential of Everyday Objects
by Adrian Madlener
0
ROUNDTABLE
02.07.2023
A Conversation About Generalists, Velocity, and the Source of Innovation
by Tiffany Jow
0
OBJECTS
02.07.2023
Using a Fungi-Infused Paste, Blast Studio Turns Trash Into Treasure
by Natalia Rachlin
Untapped is published by the design company Henrybuilt.
Untapped is published by the design company Henrybuilt.
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
12.09.2024
Why Are Scott Burton’s Benches Disappearing?

The late artist’s heavy, deliberate, costly furniture offers much more than the “lighter, quicker, cheaper” solutions often deployed in public gathering spaces today.

Black and white Scott Burton sitting on a chunky granite bench with semi-circle ends at the University of Houston
Scott Burton sitting on one of his granite benches at the University of Houston’s College of Architecture building, in 1986. (Photo: Jonathan E. Jareb)


At the peak of his fame, in the mid-1980s, artist Scott Burton often spoke of functional design and its value through the perspective of future archaeologists and anthropologists. “What matters is how intensely it reflects the history of its moment, how much it reveals of what history is about at that time,” he explained.

A performance artist, furniture designer, and art critic in the 1970s, Burton’s visibility increased greatly in the following decade. Throughout the ’80s he created sculptural furniture for plazas, parks, and lobbies across the United States until 1989, when he died from AIDS-related causes at the age of 50.

Not quite 40 years since his death, Burton’s works have fallen into relative obscurity while their functional and aesthetic durability has allowed passersby to take them for granted. A lack of fanfare and advocacy, meanwhile, has perhaps been interpreted by those in charge of their care as permission to move on from them.

What a shame it would be if those future researchers Burton thought of—or anyone else—never got the chance to enjoy his benches, settees, and chairs. Worse yet, what a shame it would be if the conditions of our own times could neither preserve Burton’s works nor embrace their ideals around visual clarity, public access, and personal comfort.

During the summer of 2020, owners of 787 Seventh Avenue, previously known as Manhattan’s Equitable Center, decided to remove an elaborate atrium installation in a privately owned public space original to the building’s 1986 completion. Arguably Burton’s best and most elaborate installation, it featured polished green marble, onyx lighting fixtures, evergreen trees, and a round pond with papyrus and reeds “growing right out of the furniture,” as the artist once described it. A 40-foot, semicircular stone settee was set just low enough to make sure people knew it should be used as a bench while allowing users to orient themselves either toward the streetscape or the indoor plant life.

Perhaps time is starting to turn on his work. Burton’s installation in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay, consisting of lighting fixtures, perforated steel benches, and travertine ottomans along nine piers, was removed in 2022 after extensive weather damage. At Battery Park City, elements of his granite benches—done in collaboration with sculptor Siah Armajani, landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg, and architect César Pelli—are scheduled to be removed next year. On the other end of the state, his dual benches for a metro rail station in Buffalo, designed as an homage to the Arts and Crafts movement, which had once flourished nearby, were relocated to make way for above-ground development.

Compared to today, when “lighter, quicker, cheaper” solutions are deployed for highly visible gathering spaces to save money and avoid controversy, Burton’s heavy, deliberate, and costly pieces with the same goals of sociability and relief seem otherworldly and self-assured. And, as we endure the current trend of bleacher steps as the go-to lobby amenity, the intimate and defined structure of Burton’s seating feels especially dignified.

Burton’s creations came out of a perceived hostility between art and architecture at the time, and a belief that public art must contain a social function, as opposed to being merely plopped down. In contributing to spaces by contemporary architects such as Pelli, I.M. Pei, Philip Johnson, and Edward Larrabee Barnes, Burton felt “a certain schizophrenia” balancing the role of artist and designer, as he wrote in a 1983 essay for Design Quarterly.

Eager to take his art out of the galleries and onto the streets, he spent the last decade of his life sacrificing the pure solitude of an artist in order to successfully collaborate with the various teams behind each public or semipublic space. It was worth it in order to, as he wrote, “bring a new fervor of imagination to our quite stagnant conception of public amenity.”

Scott Burton bench carved out of large rock on a connecting pathway between two branches of a concrete building sitting on a body of water
Scott Burton, “Rock Settee” (1988–1990). (Photo: Alise O’Brien)


The artist, a gay man, came of age living in 1970s New York, where depressed real estate values and diminished public services created opportunities for subcultures to emerge and flourish. His performance art pieces, which drew from body language and physical cues from urban queer culture, were dropped in the following decade as he pivoted to public art.

This was the decade of cities being “fun” again, as Time magazine proclaimed on an August 1981 cover featuring the developer behind the redevelopment of New York’s South Street Seaport and Baltimore’s Harborplace. Mainstream Americans were ready to rediscover their downtowns, and Burton was eager to give them somewhere to sit.

In one of Burton’s performance works, he arranged a pair of chairs close to each other while leaving a third chair far away but still turned towards them—a visual of belonging and not belonging. Such contemplations can be felt at Baltimore’s Pearlstone Park, where one finds cross-shaped concrete benches by Burton that can accommodate one person on the north and south ends, two on the east and west ends. All four sides provide back support and a little privacy by the same concrete core. The arrangement accommodates solitude and companionship all at once.

Each grouping of seats is broken up by lighting fixtures, also designed by Burton, along a slightly curved pathway connecting a light rail station to cultural and higher-ed institutions. A more hectic version of this dynamic can be seen at Burton’s outdoor installation for Manhattan’s Equitable Center, where granite benches facing different directions accommodate between one and four people along the north plaza.

Its south plaza, with its scattering of compact tables and stools made of granite and designed as inverted cones placed into cylinders, invites an ever-evolving mix of people who want to use their phones, have lunch or a coffee, gossip, or do nothing at all. Burton’s installations consistently present themselves as deliberate, unmovable, and intertwined with the buildings they support. All for the sake of supporting the fleeting urges and modest plans of anyone who comes across them.

Abstract stone benches of varied sizes and shapes on display with trees growing between them at the SculptureCenter
“Álvaro Urbano: TABLEAU VIVANT” at New York’s SculptureCenter, featuring original elements from Burton’s Equitable Center atrium installation. (Photo: Charles Benton. Courtesy the artist and SculptureCenter)


Much of Burton’s work remains intact, and there are new reasons to believe his legacy is in good hands. At Long Island City’s SculptureCenter, artist Álvaro Urbano has rearranged original elements of Burton’s atrium installation for the Equitable Center. And at St. Louis’s Pulitzer Arts Center, Burton’s first retrospective since his death celebrates his interest in furniture from his very first sculpture, in which he cast a found household chair in bronze and set it outside, to his last work, a prototype intended for therapeutic purposes and requiring perfect posture in order for the user to stay on it.

Long fascinated by the Adirondack chair, Burton’s homages to the widely popular design include one in aluminum with perforations and elongated back legs, and an armless version composed of wooden slats appearing as two intermeshed triangles. There is no lack of plastic laminate Adirondacks to be found around today’s parks, beer gardens, and makeshift outdoor gathering spaces—and with good reason. They sure are comfortable. (You can even buy one for $50 on Temu, if you dare.)

Burton put his art bona fides to use on a self-imposed challenge of making functional art, and not just for patrons who’d collect settees like they would paintings. Insisting that public art make itself useful, he provided pockets of egalitarian comfort that can—still more often than not—sustain storms, recessions, and trends. When future archaeologists and anthropologists discover his seating, they’ll find generosity, creativity, and aspiration. For now, they’re still ours to enjoy.