Canton Bench

The Canton wooden bench, designed by Franco Raggi in 1988, fitted out with two spaces on the sides—containers for magazines, books and phone directories, still in use at the time—ideally designed for home entrances, «was born, —Franco Raggi writes—, from a graphic exercise: a black line which in its continuous path creates two squares connected by a horizontal line. Dragging this line into the third dimensions, I realised that the solid thus obtained could be a bench, not a comfortable seat, but for temporary use, where ergonomics could be sacrifice in favour of an abstract, almost neoplastic image. Books and things could be put in the squares transformed into open compartments.»

In 2023, following the cataloging of the philological project of the 1980s, the Centro Studi Poltronova, together with the architect Franco Raggi, has brought out a new version of Canton, in two combinations, red and green, blue and orange, each with a positive and a negative version.