Public sofa made of glass-quartz composite: Forumtorget by White Arkitekter

The 65-metre-long bench by White Arkitekter at Forumtorget Square is the result of a seven-year development process following the office's successful participation in a design competition held by the Municipality of Uppsala.

The object, which the architects refer to as a 'public sofa', is formed out 3,500 individual waterjet-cut sections of glass-quartz composite. The overall project comprises three elements: the sofa with its multi-level and practically contiguous seating surfaces, dark granite paving and a separate sitting plateau in dark green, smoothly-polished Terrazzo.

Dsearch, the area responsible for computational design at White's in-house Research Lab, created a full-size prototype of the sofa to ensure it would fulfil a broad range of individual and social seating requirements. Ergonomic shaping enables numerous seating positions, plus brass railings and two small flights of steps intersperse the flowing silhouette of the parametric sofa landscape.