To be fair, I’ve attended my share of lectures over the years—mostly of the academic variety—and let’s just say I’ve often found them to be… oh, I don’t know… “soporific.” So if I’m compelled to attend a lecture, or corporate presentation, or even a seminar about, say, household finance management, I prefer the experience be discrete, soundless, and, of course, safe. The short way of saying this is that I want to slip in, stay awake, and slip out, having absorbed the valuable info. and absconded into the day. A new line of auditorium seating by Hussey would seem to facilitate these requirements. It’s called the Sleek Series, and it’s debuting next week at NeoCon.

Sleek Series. Manufactured by Hussey Seating.

Hussey Seating’s Sleek Series is  Clean, Modern, and Superbly Functional

As the manufacturer modestly says, “the Sleek Series fixed tables offer exciting new features.” The line aspires towards a Modernist feel, incorporating equal parts bare bones Bauhausian functionality and trendy retro appeal.

This aesthetic is most manifest in the “floating” metal modesty panels. This overt feature is silver and sleek, flanking the fronts of the fixed seats in a swooping, unified display that puts the kabosh on college professors with an habitually roving eye. I must admit that a part of me laments this exclusion of lovely legs on display, but the feature is a welcome one, and Hussey incorporates it in a slick, no-nonsense way that has broad appeal.

On the flip side of the modesty panel, one finds an array of admirable structural supports and fantastically functional seats. Sleek’s anchoring apparatus is a simple inverted T—coverless and fixed to the floor with a flat panel, thus facilitating the light and airy aesthetic of these “see-through” legs.

Completing Hussey’s ensemble for clean, contemporary, and functional fixed seating… an attractive array of seat options. Several of Hussey’s seat lines are built for easy incorporation with Sleek, including Equinox, Lunar, Latitude, Rilato, Meridian, Solstice, and Cirrus. Each of these display Hussey’s patented slim, stylish aesthetic and excellent ergonomics, and all of them are available as task seating with fixed tables or in a space-saving incarnation atop Hussey’s smart swing-away pedestals.

About the Manufacturer: How many contract manufacturers can say they have their own museum? I can’t say for sure, but I know that Hussey leads the way. The “world leader in spectator seating solutions,” Hussey manufactures seating for stadiums, arenas, gymnasiums, auditoriums, and theaters. To give an idea of Hussey’s range of expertise, the company debuted in 1835—that’s four years before the invention of modern baseball. They thus know a thing or two about the development of spectator seating. This knowledge includes, but certainly isn’t limited to, telescopic bleachers, fixed seating, portable staging, and portable retractable bleachers: “Hussey Seating bleachers, chairs and staging are designed, engineered, and built to stand out from the crowd and stand the test of time.”