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Type: Art Location: Zoetermeer Client: Municipality Zoetermeer Team: Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers with Joost Lemmens, Rolf Pederson Cost: Euro 90.000,00 First design: 2005-09-24

Our proposal for the Water Theatre on the Oostkade in Zoetermeer, 6 metres below sea level, takes the form of an intervention in public space; however, the intervention is not meant to be the actual work of art, but to make art out of a public space: a theatre. 

We will widen the stairway from the dike to the water to act as a grandstand. A curtain that responds to the presence of passers-by, to on-lookers, will frame the view. The proposed dock will extend further into the water. It is a potential podium, but in a much stronger sense, real life is the podium.  

The curtain is a permanent screen of flowing water; 6 metres high. It shows manifestly how the polder is situated in relation to sea level. The flowing water dramatises the level of the polder. When closed, the curtain acts like a shutter, obscuring the view offered from the Oostkade of the canal and the houses. The curtain is linked to sensors in the bank that respond when a passer-by takes a step onto the bank. Then the curtain opens in front of the visitor, suddenly showing a view of the waterway. Everyday, familiar reality suddenly becomes a work of art: reality is art.

Type: Public space / Art Location: Tilburg Client: KORT; Municipality Tilburg Team: Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers with Geoffrey Moote, Joost Lemmens Floor area / size: 20 sqm Cost: Euro 90.000,00 First design: 2005-05-10 Status: In development

2008-01-12 Restart for the Textile Monument

A monument to represent the blossoming and flourishing of the city of Tilburg, a ‘textielgroeimonument’ (textile growth monument), will be realized at the Textielmuseum Tilburg in 2009 as part of the celebration of the 800^th anniversary of the city. Since the Mommerscomplex that accommodates the textile museum is metaphorically speaking a living monument, would it perhaps be possible to create a textile growing monument that is literally built up from living matter?

We will place the new volume in the open space in front of the present entrance and the chimney: a shape that brings to mind the high factory buildings; a reprise of the building structure of the textile museum.

The overgrowth lends to the monument the dynamics of nature. It literally grows, and this ensures that it always looks alive. It is not a massive volume but a transparent, open structure. The structure includes a void: the same typical house-shape – but with its ridge on a parallel with Goirkestraat – and thus a reminder of the building originally located on this site, Christiaan Mommers’ house, in which a single loom sowed the seeds of  the current complex.

A platform connects the interior space with the courtyard. It provides a possible connection to the monument and a starting point in the open space around the complex. It facilitates encounters and exchanges and in doing so it adopts the part of accelerator in the creative public domain that is currently being developed in Goirkestraat. And so as the volume turns the past into a visible experience in the present, the platform is the first step towards the future.

Type: Pavilion Client: Arboretum Kalmthout Team: Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers, John van de Water Cost: Euro 16.000,00 Competition: 2nd prize First design: 2002-07-12 Status: Competition

Papilio is a pavilion for a butterfly garden in the Arboretum Kalmthout, Belgium. The concept for the pavilion was instigated by the metamorphosis of a butterfly.  

A flexible wooden construction is transformed, section by section, from a simple square to an open space covered by a wing; in this spot, the visitor can find information about butterflies, take shelter from the weather, rest a bit, and enjoy a beautiful panorama over the garden, all the while engaging in a special spatial experience.

Type: Pumping station Location: Amsterdam Client: dRO Amsterdam Team: Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers, John van de Water Competition: Honourable mention First design: 2002-06-14

This is a design for a public utility building: a sewage-pumping station. Utilitarian buildings are junctions in the invisible infrastructure of a city and therefore crucial for its function. But since they house machines rather than people, they have no relation with people and thereby often have no relation with their surroundings. 

In an attempt to create this relation between the building and the surroundings, we added a second function to the pumping station, that of skate landscape. The shape is the result of a superimposition of the sewer station and regular skate elements.

The functional form generates an attractive sculptural quality and represents the dynamics of the program, both inside and out.

Type: Public Space / Art Location: Almere Client: Stichting Bosland Team: Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers, John van de Water with Stan Wagter, Marrit deJong Cost: Euro 1.000.000,00 Competition: 3rd Prize First design: 2001-09-01 Status: On hold

design for 1 hectare ‘museum’-forest

This is not a design for a new forest but an operation that puts the existing forest in a new perspective. Just like a museum designer is unconcerned with museological objects as such, but rather focuses on the way people look at them, we took this assignment as a chance to transform the woods into a woods museum by creating the possibility of a new kind of perception. 

Adding a circular path with a 100-m diameter provides the woods with an extra dimension. On one end, the path reaches a height of 35 m and provides a view of the horizon, on the other end it drops to 3 m underground so people can experience the woods at ant height. The raised end of the path encloses a section of the woods and this creates an exceptional spot. The hectare of woodland that is shut in by the path will remain unkempt and transform into primeval forest, which makes it an example of the transformations woods may undergo through the years.

Over the past 27 years, the woods, which was originally a poplar plantation, has already developed into a highly varied section of forest, full of different types of plants, trees and animals. The process can be observed from the different levels of the circular path over the years: from bird’s-eye view to worm perspective. Creating the circular path requires a total of approximately 42 km of bamboo consisting of 18,750 trunks of 2.2 m long. We are still looking for financing.