This modified seating object combines a classic bentwood café chair with a stainless steel armrest taken from public furniture. The project brings together a Thonet chair, historically associated with the Viennese coffeehouse as a place of social exchange, and an armrest commonly found in so-called defensive architecture. Such design strategies are used in public space to prevent certain behaviours, such as lying down or loitering for long periods of time, and, in doing so, exclude specific groups of people. With the insertion of the armrest into the seat, the chair can no longer be used as intended. What appears as an ergonomic support reveals itself as a tool of restriction, shifting the role of design from enabling shared use to enforcing control.

As such, the work raises the question of how design shapes access to public space, whether it invites participation or quietly enforces exclusion.

Benjamin Nagy is a designer and artist whose practice moves between art and design, often working with familiar objects. Through subtle interventions, he exposes the assumptions embedded in everyday design and invites a reconsideration of how we relate to the built environment.