soft baroque's kinetic bench in spanish plaza sways and twists when you sit on it

dancing bench reimagines public furniture at Concéntrico 2025

Soft Baroque brings motion to the ubiquitous with their Dancing Bench installation at Concéntrico in Logroño, Spain. The kinetic public bench is part of an ongoing series by the studio that explores how familiar objects can be recharged through unexpected mechanics and sensory experiences. Installed in an urban plaza for the festival, the piece appears as a deceptively simple sculptural volume, until it moves, activating the body and disorienting perception.

The structure is made of parallel planes that manually rotate when weight is applied, creating a continuous ripple that subtly distorts space and sensation. As the user sits and begins to sway or shift, the bench sways too, generating an interplay between optical illusion and physical engagement, with the movement smooth, soothing, and slightly uncanny.

all images courtesy of Josema Cutillas

soft baroque brings motion to the ubiquitous

With backgrounds spanning object design and visual art, Nicholas Gardner and Saša Štucin of Soft Baroque have built a practice on collapsing boundaries between typology and image, and utility and illusion. Their Dancing Furniture series embraces the everyday object or infrastructure as a performative element capable of inviting attention, companionship, or contemplation. At Concéntrico, the Dancing Bench is activated with a small theatrical motion that asks people in public space to move a little differently, and to reflect on how objects behave around them.

Like many of Soft Baroque’s works, the Dancing Bench draws from a visual language of mid-century modernism while pushing material logic toward conceptual ends. The crisp geometry, repetitive surfaces, and minimal palette give way to a subtle strangeness that emerges only in use, with the design toying with expectations of public furniture, transforming a passive place of rest into a shared instrument of motion. ‘When we dance ‘with’ the bench, sit on it and rotate, it is a mediative and soothing experience, like a rocking chair or hammock,’ explains the team.

Soft Baroque unveils the Dancing Bench at Concéntrico

the installation brings motion to the ubiquitous with their Dancing Bench

the kinetic public bench sways and twists when you sit on it

part of an ongoing series that explores how familiar objects can be recharged through unexpected mechanics

the structure is made of parallel planes that manually rotate when weight is applied

the movement is smooth, soothing, and slightly uncanny

drawing from a visual language of mid-century modernism while pushing material logic toward conceptual ends

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project info:

name: Dancing Bench

designer: Soft Baroque | @soft_baroque

location: Logroño, Spain