NEXT 4/89

Type: Exhibition Client: Platform 21 Team: Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers Collaborator / associate: Roelof Mulder, Joanna van der Zand Floor area / size: 200 sqm

Stuffed animals, monsters and robots – we love them! This exhibition investigated the emotional bond people have with nonliving beings. In addition to the exhibition, there were create-your-own-stuffed-character workshops with Maoma and Hanazuki and character-writing workshops by The Little League.

The great diversity of exhibition material needed a flexible design that could be adapted easily until the very last day of the exhibit. We came up with the idea of using large scale mobiles, to which elements large or small could be added, for each character: The result was a very playful exhibition space that suited the character of the subject.

Type: exhibition in progress Location: Garage Municipal Chaumont, France Client: Werkplaats Typografie, Arnhem Team: Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers, Claudia Linders with Geoffrey Moote Collaborator / associate: Labeled / Claudia Linders Floor area / size: 1.000 sqm Cost: Euro 35.000,00 Competition: May 2005

The exhibition was in keeping with the dynamics of the creation process of this catalogue. The base material for the exhibition consisted of over 600 large cardboard boxes, literally the building blocks. At the beginning of the process these boxes filled the entire location, a large municipal garage. The removal, shifting and stacking of boxes within this vast area resulted in communal spaces: for a lecture room, a bookshop and a kitchen.

The students created their own work space in the area, and used the boxes they had to remove to do so to create walls and surfaces on which they displayed their work.

The exhibition was ever moving, and never complete. Depending on the unexpected dynamics of the creation of the publication, boxes were removed, relocated or transformed. The movement stopped only when the publication was completed and had taken over the position of the exhibition on 24 June.

Type: Exhibition design Location: Foro Traiano, Rome, Italy Client: Marianna Vecellio, curator Team: Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers, John van de Water

Dutch design is known for shifting the boundary between reality and fiction, for its ironic re-interpretation of our everyday environment, for a search for the escape from the real.

WonderHolland proposes the confrontation of this attitude within the monumental setting of the Foro Traiano. But how can we re-invent reality in a context where reality is already based on the endless stratification of a thousand different histories? Where the everyday reality already confronts us with the superposition of the transient artefacts of our consumer age with the surreal presence of a solitary column, bearing the burden of a few thousand years? 

We propose a single intervention that allows us to present the Foro Traiano in a new perspective; a single intervention as a device to allocate the territory of the Dutch Art and Design in the overwhelming monumentality of the historical context; a single intervention, based on the endless stratification of the historical context. We propose the addition of a new layer to the existing everyday reality.

This new layer consists of a framework, a layout of rooms. This lay-out is represented only by their foundations, a new ruin in itself. The rooms are connected by doors. These doors mark the threshold of another world, a new reality. There is no inside, no more outside. Like Alice, one tumbles from one room into another.

Type: Exhibition Client: Stimuleringsfonds voor Architectuur Team: Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers, John van de Water

Under the name ‘Group portraits’,  an overview of four newly-emerging practices was made, including NEXT architects. In two locations, Almere and Nijmegen, works were shown and studies done to map the development of expanding areas of the two cities.  

NEXT designed wallpaper that was shown in two places at the same time: in Nijmegen it was mounted on a wall; in Almere we used an equal amount of the wallpaper to wrap an object. In this way Almere became the inversion of Nijmegen.