“span” bench

Object: “the.span.4″ Corian bench

Location: Spells Writing Center, 2526 N. Alder St.

Background: During DesignPhiladelphia 2009, C.H. Briggs and DuPont Corian challenged local designers to use Corian to create innovative street furniture. They manufactured 14 of the entries. You can see more of the winners here.

Context: Once the benches had their days in the sun, CH Briggs donated them to different organizations around the city, including Spells Writing Center [full disclosure: I'm a cofounder of Spells and serve on their Advisory Board]; CHAD, the Charter High School for Architecture + Design; KIPP Philadelphia Schools; and Young Scholars Charter School, a Spells program partner.

Spells was supposed to receive a different bench but ended up with “the.span.4″ because of its heft. Thanks to its steel skeleton, it weighs in at around 800 pounds which was too heavy for its previously denoted location. Chris Dawson of LSC Design, based in York, Pennsylvania, designed the bench. West Chester–based MacLaren Fabrication, Inc., made it. A crew from Maclaren delivered it one hot June day in 2010, wheeling “Span” on a truckbed down narrow Alder Street and into the courtyard next to the Spells building. Then they pushed the bench uphill … slowly. Spells is on the campus of the Village of Arts and Humanities, and the installation drew a little crowd of little villagers. Span now serves as seating for warm-weather activities at Spells.

C.H. Briggs and Corian have a showroom in Philly’s Marketplace Design Center, and the company initiates plenty of collaborations to show off the diversity of a material once pigeonholed as the go-to surface for grandma’s kitchen counters.

Bonus: To understand the extent of Corian’s capabilities, read this piece I wrote about Bordeaux’s Corian-clad Hotel Seeko’o.