Daybed is a functional sculpture that brings the intimacy of the private sphere into the outdoor space. It invites us to examine the limits and possibilities of urban infrastructures and encourages us to think about forms of being together and communal regeneration.

Where productivity and efficiency are paramount in the public sphere, resting or even sleeping outdoors is seen as a sacrifice of too much intimacy that violates social norms. But regeneration is the essential flip side of the productivity coin. Not least in order to use the city’s resources – whether human endurance or fossil fuels – sustainably and to mutualize them through communal use, it is necessary to rely on shared infrastructures of care, warmth and generosity.

Since ancient times, there have been multifunctional pieces of furniture that were used as beds and seats and symbolized not only comfort, but also social status and the ability to afford to rest and offer it to guests. Even today, the daybed as a furniture typology stands for private living comfort like no other – a “luxury for all” not in the socialist sense, but in the market economy sense, where cheaply produced mass products are references to historical models that we can actually afford neither individually nor socially. However, the outdoor daybed invites critical reflection on urban space as a social, curated structure. It raises the question of how public and private spheres can be interwoven to enable sleepy and lazy forms of togetherness.

The material of the daybed – stove tiles salvaged from individual apartments in the IDEAL art space building – creates a specific contextual connection between inside and outside: the tiles, once part of a now obsolete heating supply system, have been removed from tiled stoves that were about to be demolished and have now been collaged into a patchwork in the garden. Their arrangement is reminiscent of a patchwork quilt, which is used as a bedspread on many sofas and beds and reassembles textile materials that have become obsolete in a similar way.