Dutch design office Rietveld Landscape has built an arched foam screen with hundreds of building-shaped holes inside a disused chapel at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht (+ slideshow).
Rietveld Landscape designed the screen as a reversal of its Vacant NL exhibition from the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, where a suspended model city was used to demonstrate the potential of 10,000 vacant government spaces in the Netherlands.
Here, the installation presents the “negative spaces” of the model city and stretches from the floor of the mezzanine all the way up to the ceiling. It will form a backdrop to a changing selection of objects from the museum’s collection of applied arts and design from the last two centuries.
“The blue window literally and figuratively sheds a new light on the space and complements the architecture of this medieval chapel,” says the studio.
The installation is on show at the Centraal Museum until 31 January 2014.
Rietveld Landscape is a design and research office based in Amsterdam. Its other projects include an installation that looked like a burning building and a criss-crossing bridge. See more architecture by Rietveld Landscape.
Photography is by Rob ‘t Hart.
Read on for more information from Rietveld Landscape:
Pretty Vacant
The installation Pretty Vacant by design and research studio Rietveld Landscape encourages visitors to take a fresh look at the empty spaces of the Centraal Museum. The blue window literally and figuratively sheds a new light on the space and complements the architecture of this medieval chapel. The window is based on the ‘negative spaces’ of Rietveld Landscape’s earlier installation Vacant NL, which was the Dutch submission for the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010. The installation in the Gerrit Rietveld-designed pavilion in Venice showed the enormous potential of 10,000 disused public buildings in the Netherlands from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries.
Rietveld Landscape’s work fits in well with the Centraal Museum aim to acquire work at the intersection of art, design and architecture. Rietveld Landscape is a young studio that represents in an outstanding way the new developments at this intersection. Museum Director Edwin Jacobs described them as “the talents in field of spatial interventions, without equivalent in any existing architectural or theoretical discourse. They are real new-thinkers in images.”
Through the acquisition of this installation by Rietveld Landscape with support from the Mondriaan Fund, the Centraal Museum has realised its ambition of adding Vacant NL to the ‘Collectie Nederland’.
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