This project is about to design a bench for the outer area of the museum of Keramikos, in Athens, Greece.  

 

Keramikos is located in the northwest of Acropolis, and was the site of an important cemetery. The museum includes an extensive area collection of burial – related artifacts, varying from sculpture to funeral urns, jewelry, toys etc. The museum incorporates a building and an extended outer area, where the visitors can wander and observe the monuments. During the summer period, where the traffic is the highest, the extremes of weather conditions, such as, high temperature and the hot sun, make the touring of the visitors in the outer side of museum, extremely difficult. Considering the fact, that the visitors may are elderly people, we see that this is an even more intense problem. The visitors need to have a few minutes’ stops during their touring. They may also feel uneasy to sit in the same seat with a stranger. It is also important the aesthetic of the bench to be related with the aesthetic of the monuments of the museum. So the research included the study of the monuments and the chronological periods which are related to, field observation and questionnaires given to the stuff of museum.

This concept is a bench with a form related to shapes that we meet in the monuments of the museum. Besides the field of the aesthetic, this form serves other needs too. Particularly, in the convex side of the bench can sit strangers who don’t want to look to each other while sitting, and in the concave shape of the bench can sit friends, relatives, and generally people who feel comfortable with each other or with strangers.

The second concept offers a demarcation between people who seat in the opposite site of the bench and offers a higher level of comfort with the seatback.

The third concept offers an individual seat for every visitor. It consists from a smaller size of bench comparing to the others concept, and so, it offers more options for arrangements of more than one bench in the space. Through these arrangements, people who visited the museum with a friend can seat while looking to each other and people don’t feel uneasy to seat with strangers due to the demarcated seats. The design of the seat is related to the aesthetic of museum.