Design series: the hidden meaning in our benches and lampposts
Life and Art from FT Weekend
Forhecz Topher
4.6 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 1 April 2024
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to the first episode in our special four-part series on design! Today, Lilah speaks with the FT’s longtime architecture and design critic Edwin Heathcote to talk about an often-forgotten element of design in cities. It’s called “street furniture,” and it describes the objects we pass every day: from phone booths and lampposts to manhole covers and park benches. Last year, Edwin published a book on this called “On the Street”, which elevates the small pieces of design that surround us on the sidewalk. He tells Lilah what he notices when he takes walks, and offers advice for how to see these details in our own cities, too.
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We love hearing from you. Lilah is on Instagram @lilahrap and we’re on X @lifeandartpod. You can email the show at lifeandart@ft.com.
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Links (all FT links get you past the paywall):
– Edwin’s piece about street furniture for the FT: https://on.ft.com/49b0z0p
– Edwin’s book is called On the Street: In-Between Architecture: https://heni.com/publishing/on-the-street-edwin-heathcote
– Pieces from Edwin’s original series in the FT, published between 2015 and 2017: manhole covers // fire hydrants // telephone boxes // street lights // sidewalks // advertising columns // public benches
– We also recommend this recent piece by Edwin about Italian designer Enzo Mari, who hated the design industry: https://on.ft.com/4aQvWPp
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Special FT subscription offers for Life and Art podcast listeners, from 50% off a digital subscription to a $1/£1/€1 trial, are here: http://ft.com/lifeandart
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Original music by Metaphor Music. Mixing and sound design by Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco
Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, listeners. Before we start, just a small fun announcement, I'm excited to let you know that this episode is the first in a four-part special series about design. |
| 0:10.3 | It will be spaced out over the next few weeks and will include two bonus Wednesday episodes. So look out for them. Okay, hope you enjoy. |
| 0:25.9 | Welcome to Life and Art from FT. Weekend. I'm Lila Raptopolis. When we think of the look of a city, most of us probably think of the skyline. |
| 0:32.4 | But there's a whole other aesthetic world of a city that you can only see when you zoom in close. |
| 0:38.3 | It's the design that exists in everyday objects, lamp posts, phone booths, fire hydrants, drains, |
| 0:44.6 | things that seem so ephemeral that we barely notice their design. |
| 0:48.1 | There's a term for these things. |
| 0:49.6 | They're called street furniture. |
| 0:51.3 | And my colleague Edwin Hethkut has been studying them for a long time. Edwin |
| 0:55.7 | has been the F.T.'s Architecture and Design Critic for 25 years. Is that correct? That's right. |
| 1:00.6 | Okay. He's the author of more than a dozen books, and his work just makes the world feel a little |
| 1:06.3 | clearer. He helps you find poetry in The Mundane. Last year he published a book on this topic called On the |
| 1:12.8 | Street, and he's with me in the London studio to talk about how to see your city with fresh eyes. |
| 1:18.2 | Edwin, hi, welcome to the show. |
| 1:19.7 | Thanks so much. Hi, Lowe. Hi, thanks for being here. So maybe we can start with the basics, |
| 1:23.9 | which is just how would you define street furniture? Like, what qualifies? |
| 1:28.9 | Yeah, it's a fairly simple classification, I think. It's a layer of public amenity. |
| 1:35.3 | You could say an infrastructure of public goods. When we think of architecture, we think of |
| 1:40.5 | five-story buildings or skyscrapers or whatever. It's a big scale. |
| 1:45.8 | And then we have the body in the city, the human body. |
| 1:48.4 | And then this stuff is kind of at the scale of the body because it's in the street. |
| 1:52.3 | It's all to do with how we move through the city and how we use it. |
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