ORANGE
ALERT
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Orange
Alert: Dutch Design 2005-2006: An unprecedented roster of high-profile
events
Dear Reader: We hope that you enjoyed the holiday season and that the New Year started off well! 2005 turned out to be an exciting year full of wonderful Dutch design projects at venerable institutions throughout New York City. 2006 promises to bring more of the same, with this year showing many great projects at premier organizations throughout the United States. Moss recently opened ShimmerGlimmerTwinkleSparkleShine, a spectacular chandelier extravaganza with a sparkling piece by Tord Boontje. The Center for Architecture opened The Fashion of Architecture, a contemporary look at how these disciplines interact, with work by among others Winka Dubbeldam and Lars Spuybroek. Further down the line there will be the second Art Center College of Design conference in Pasadena, "Radical Craft," with among the key-note speakers Claudie Jongstra, Theo Jansen and Tord Boontje. In May, a group of Dutch designers and design businesses will present themselves during New York Design Week, and Space Downtown will introduce All Access, a must-visit for design afficionados and collectors alike. And September will bring the much-anticipated Droog Design survey at the Museum of Arts & Design. This, and much more will be announced and reported on through this newsletter and www.dutchdesignevents.com in the coming weeks and months. This week the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia will present a site-specific commissioned installation by renowned architects Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos of UN Studio in collaboration with Imaginary Forces. The "Holiday Home" is an experiential installation exploring and quantifying areas in which the holiday home departs from modern design conventions. The orthogonal surfaces of the archetypal house are extruded and skewed creating the sculptural armature within which the dichotomies of home and holiday home are played out. The new architectural shape emulates escapism, the expectation of a holiday as removed from the everyday experiential routine. The interplay of what is real and what is virtual transpires on a number of levels touching on ideas of collective memory and phenomenological perceptions.The unadorned construction allows attention to be directed towards the spatial configurations of the structure. Visitor movement through the installation activates unexpected views and the multidirectional shadows cast create unpredictable perspectives as they fall onto faceted surfaces. The perception of time is intrinsically interwoven into the project as light conditions subtly modulate referencing different atmospheric qualities; the sense of season and time of day become more abstract as you may find on holiday where time has a different rhythm as it is unbound by the frameworks of contemporary patterns of living and dwelling. Based in Amsterdam, van Berkel and Bos have realized several internationally acclaimed projects, including the Erasmus Bridge (Rotterdam, 1990-96), the widely publicized Möbius House (Het Gooi, 1993-98), and most recently, the opening of the Mercedes Benz Museum (Stüttgart, 2006). Their work was also featured in the International Architecture Exhibition of the 2004 Venice Biennale. Van Berkel and Bos's firm, UN Studio, is meant to act as a "powerhouse" in which architects, graphic designers, stylists, engineers, and other building and creative professionals can collaborate dynamically. Van Berkel, a self-described "hyper-modernist," strives to design on the cutting edge while maintaining coherence with the surrounding landscape, and credits the computer for his designs' noted fluidity. Bos, an art historian, serves as in-house critic, all-purpose debunker, and producer of conceptual and theoretical literature.. We hope that you will enjoy visiting or reading about these projects! For additional and up to date information, please visit www.dutchdesignevents.com. Best regards, Robert
Kloos, Editor |
