Textile Monument
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
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 800th 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.
