After reading this book by the distinguished landscape architect Laurie Olin, I realized how certain rituals of sharing life in public out of doors have been made comfortable by centuries of design practitioners from antiquity to the present. This is especially so in Paris, where Olin first studied park and café life. In fact, Be Seated is three books in one: first, the narrative encompassing the history of outdoor seating down to current design practices—Olin’s and others; second, almost 50 years’ worth of his endearing, squiggly ink and watercolor sketchbook renderings, with handwritten commentary, interleaved between text pages, making his points actively visible. Finally, he includes photographs of contemporary parks, squares, and other public places. The effect is richly cumulative when read or studied in sequence.

Though Classical amphitheaters and low stone ledges encircling Renaissance churches and fountains made for early communal seating, paramount through time is the proliferation of benches and chairs, in wood, metal, or stone. As Olin says, “Almost all benches are really just stretched chairs.” On another page, his sketch of banquettes and Thonet bentwood chairs inside a Viennese café shows the inspiration for his juxtaposition of a stone ledge “bench” and Harry Bertoia chairs outdoors in New York’s Paley Park. In essence, the book is both show and tell. With his exquisite eye for detail and vast knowledge gained through an academic and professional life and travels on both coasts and abroad, Olin writes the story in a personal and thoughtful manner, highlighting both the places where people have “pleasure in one another’s company” and the designs that made them possible. Examples include an ornate garden bench designed by William Kent for Rousham Gardens in England, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s many-styled benches for New York’s Central Park, and Antoni Gaudí’s curvilinear seat wall for Park Güell in Barcelona.