Coral Bench

Coral Bench is a fifty-foot-long, multi-tiered seating installation in the Seattle Aquarium’s new Ocean Pavilion. The bench was designed and fabricated entirely by LMN Architects at their in-house fabrication facility, the Shop, in Seattle, WA, and installed by the team on-site at the new building on the Seattle Waterfront.

The bench, comprised of fourteen segments that form a near half-circle, is clad entirely in locally sourced Douglas Fir with no visible hardware, and feature a milled seating surface modeled using reaction-diffusion, the same mathematical equation responsible for patterning brain coral. By approaching both the fabrication and design of the bench as a holistic process, the LMN design team was able to directly engage both the client and the design process of the larger project, which created an opportunity to address multiple design challenges at once, including ADA seating accommodations, overhead cane detection, and budget constraints.

The bench, with its sweeping curves and soft edges, offers a deeply tactile opportunity to experience the design of the new Ocean Pavilion. The team worked with the aquarium to build a durable, inviting object on which guests can sit, recline, or lean as they take in the surrounding exhibits, including a direct view of the main habitats. The bench, situated at the base of the main staircase in One Ocean Hall, stands like a small reef. Guests moving through may pause and momentarily experience the joy and solitude of what a reef offers, much like the other creatures in the surrounding aquatic habitats.