BEHIND TCA DESIGN – Bench

The Silent Alphabet of Order – SCAMNUM

In a waiting room where thousands of faces briefly meet each year, where identities are verified, travel documents issued, and diplomatic formalities performed, one might assume that the furniture is nothing more than functional scenery: pragmatic, invisible, utilitarian. Yet in the design of the bench-garderobe by TCA for the Swiss General Consulate, the opposite reveals itself. Here, the furniture becomes a manifesto—not loud, not pompous, but through a quiet yet structurally meaningful whisper upon the wall.
This linear wooden structure, which stretches along the wall like a graphic sign—a lemniscate, a Möbius strip, or even a canon—does not immediately reveal its meaning. Like every good semiotic object, it refuses the viewer mere surface and invites interpretation. For this bench is not just a bench. It is simultaneously a bench, a coat rack, a sculpture, and an ordering system—a spatial sign that does not oppose the room but seems to shape it.
It begins low at the floor, where it functions as seating. But rather than ending anywhere, it rises toward the entrance. Its steps become shelves; its elevation turns into a coat rack. It evokes a Gregorian chant rising slowly from a low tone, gaining volume yet following the same rhythm throughout.
Thus, the piece becomes a semiotic interface between body, space, and institution. It offers not just support for the body, but a frame for waiting—a state that in consulates is never merely functional, but deeply symbolic. To wait means: to desire, to hope, to fulfill. And here exactly, TCA’s bench is a subtle sign of state hospitality. It says: “Here is a place for you—not just anywhere, but right here. You are part of an ordered structure.”
It is a design that reveals architecture’s discreet power: it guides without forcing. It offers without imposing. It is there even when no one is there. A bench where even absence sits.
And perhaps, if one listens very quietly, the bench speaks—not in sentences, but in lines. Not in words, but in wood.