Inside Outside/Petra Blaisse, Sonneveld House². Other vision on Dutch Modernity
16/02/2015.
Sonneveld House² [Rotterdam], The Netherlands
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA
Petra Blaisse’s installation at the Sonneveld House is great opportunity to discover other point of view on architecture. The house is one of Rotterdam’s modernity architectural gems, the house was designed by Brinkman & Van der Vlugt, the architects of the nearby Van Nelle Factory, where Mr. Sonneveld had worked his way up from clerk to co-director. Like the factory, now a Unesco World Heritage site, the house is a model of the Nieuwe Bouwen, or New Building, school of early-20th-century Dutch architecture whose defining qualities were “light, air and space.” Working to the Sonneveld’ brief, the architects used the latest construction techniques to create a steel structure with daylight flowing freely through big windows.
Outside vision. Sonneveld house. Photogrphy © Johannes Schwartz/Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2015.
Inside Outside / Petra Blaisse, Sonneveld House². Sonneveld House. Photogrphy © Johannes Schwartz/Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2015.
Inside Outside / Petra Blaisse, Sonneveld House². Sonneveld House. Photogrphy © Johannes Schwartz/Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2015.
Inside Outside / Petra Blaisse, Sonneveld House². Sonneveld House. Photogrphy © Johannes Schwartz/Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2015.
Inside Outside / Petra Blaisse, Sonneveld House². Sonneveld House. Photogrphy © Johannes Schwartz/Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2015.
Inside Outside / Petra Blaisse, Sonneveld House². Sonneveld House. Photogrphy © Johannes Schwartz/Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2015.
Inside Outside / Petra Blaisse, Sonneveld House². Sonneveld House. Photogrphy © Johannes Schwartz/Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2015.
Inside Outside / Petra Blaisse, Sonneveld House². Sonneveld House. Photogrphy © Johannes Schwartz/Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2015.
The dining room at Sonneveld. Photogrphy © Johannes Schwartz/Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2015.
Outside vision. Sonneveld house. Photogrphy © Johannes Schwartz/Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2015.
Outside vision. Sonneveld house. Photogrphy © Johannes Schwartz/Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2015.
This year Het Nieuwe Instituut invited as guest curator Petra Blaisse offers visitors a totally new experience of Sonneveld House with one ingenious intervention. The house was designed in the early 1930s by architecture firm Brinkman en Van der Vlugt in the Dutch Functionalist style, with the interior created in collaboration with furniture designer W.H. Gispen.
Petra Blaisse’s project, which opened on 1st February and runs through Sept. 13, is part of a series of experiments with which Het Nieuwe Instituut (the New Institute), the cultural center that manages the Sonneveld House, is developing new ways of exhibiting design, architecture and technology. Inviting artists and designers to install their work in “house museums” like the Sonneveld is a proven means of encouraging more people to visit. But Petra Blaisse has gone further by raising questions about the functions of such places and their presumed authenticity.
“I enjoy visiting house-museums like Charles and Ray Eames’s home in Pacific Palisades and Lina Bo Bardi’s in São Paulo and seeing their knick-knacks as if they’d just left them there,” said Blaisse. “But we wanted to trigger something different here by asking what it means in a museological sense to preserve a place like this.”
Interior designer and landscape architect Petra Blaisse explores the limits of architecture of Dutch Functionalism with her office Inside Outside by enhancing or temporarily transforming the unique qualities of buildings and their outdoor spaces. Blaisse is renowned for the soft yet compelling way she separates or envelops space with monumental curtain and her collaboration with OMA's projects.
The first floor of Sonneveld House features a sequence of open spaces. Generous expanses of fenestration set in elegant steel frames ensure an almost borderless connection with the surrounding garden. When daylight floods the interior, the room and furniture almost appear to float. With this transformation Inside/Outside responds to three principles of architecture: light, air and space.
Anyone visiting the house, which opened to the public in 2001, over the next few months will find the books and towels in their customary places, but will also see them from unexpected perspectives in the reflections on the mirrored floors. As well as creating exquisite visual effects from changes in the climate and light, the reflections expose things that are usually hidden from view, like the servants’ bell concealed beneath a dining table and the soundboard under the piano. They also remind visitors that they are not in a real home, but in a museological reconstruction, by revealing the sensors, alarms and other gizmos with which it is controlled.
“The key question for us is always how to set up a new type of discussion, and that’s precisely what Petra has done,” said Guus Beumer, the director of the institute.
Other cultural centers around the world are also rethinking their approaches to these fields. Until recently, architecture museums tended to focus on that discipline, while their design equivalents concentrated on industrial design, and technology was generally neglected.
“I am very curious to see how people will respond to seeing everything in the house, including things that are usually covered up,” said Blaisse.
Venue.- [museum house beside Het Nieuwe Instituut] Jongkindstraat 12, Rotterdam. The Netherlands.
Dates.- 1 February 2015. Through, 13 September 2015
More information
PETRA BLAISSE
Petra Blaisse (London 1955), more popularly known in the world of architecture, for her colaboration in some of the most brilliant projects by Rem Koolhaas, as the carpets and finishes for the Seattle Central Library (2000-2004) or finishes and curtains for the Casa da Música in Porto (1999-2005) and acoustic walls, started her career at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, in the Department of Applied Arts. It was there that Blaisse first collaborated with Koolhaas. From 1987, she worked as freelance designer and won distinction for her installations of architectural work, in which the exhibited work was challenged more than displayed. Gradually her focus shifted to the use of textiles, light and finishes in interior space and, at the same time, to the design of gardens and landscapes.
In 1991, she founded Inside Outside. Since 1999 Blaisse invited specialist of various disciplines to work with her and currently the team consists of about ten people of different nationalities. Inside Outside works globally on projects of increasing technical sophistication and scale. Throughout the years, Inside Outside has collaborated with various architects and designers. Blaisse has lectured and taught extensively in Europe, Asia and the United States.
In the past years, the opening of a number of public and private buildings in which Inside Outside implemented interior and landscape interventions brought the work of Blaisse’s studio to the attention of a broader public. Examples are the restoration project for the Hackney Empire Theatre in London (all curtains, 2000-2005), the gardens, carpets and finishes for the Seattle Central Library (2000-2004), finishes and curtains for the Casa da Música in Porto (1999-2005) and acoustic walls and curtains for the Mercedes Benz museum in Stuttgart.
For landscape design, the studio presently works, together with OMA Hong Kong and Rotterdam, on the landscape masterplan for the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong and on public gardens (Shenzhen Stock Exchange, Qatar Foundation Headquarters and Education City Library) and on master plans for new urban development areas in Ghadames and Sebha, Libya.
ACT > 01.2019 
JOSÉ JUAN BARBA
José Juan Barba (1964) architect from ETSA Madrid in 1991. Special Mention in the National Finishing University Education Awards 1991. PhD in Architecture ETSAM, 2004. He founded his professional practice in Madrid in 1992 (www.josejuanbarba.com). He is an architecture critic and editor-in-chief of METALOCUS magazine since 1999, and he was advising different NGOs until 1997. He has been a lecturer (in Design, Theory and Criticism, and Urban planning) and guest lecturer at different national and international universities (Roma TRE, Polytechnic Milan, ETSA Madrid, ETSA Barcelona, UNAM Mexico, Univ. Iberoamericana Mexico, University of Thessaly Volos, FA de Montevideo, Washington, Medellin, IE School, U.Alicante, Univ. Europea Madrid, UCJC Madrid, ESARQ-U.I.C. Barcelona,...).
Maître de Conférences IUG-UPMF Grenoble 2013-14. Full assistant Professor, since 2003 up to now at the University of Alcalá School of Architecture, Madrid, Spain. And Jury in competitions as Quaderns editorial magazine (2011), Mies van der Rohe Awards, (2010-2022), Europan13 (2015). He has been invited to participate in the Biennale di Venezia 2016 as part "Spaces of Exception / Spazi d'Eccezione".
He has published several books, the last in 2016, "#positions" and in 2015 "Inventions: New York vs. Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, Piranesi " and collaborations on "Spaces of Exception / Spazi d'Eccezione", "La Mansana de la discordia" (2015), "Arquitectura Contemporánea de Japón: Nuevos territorios" (2015)...
Awards.-
- Award. RENOVATION OF SEGURA RIVER ENVIRONMENT, Murcia, Sapin, 2010.
- First Prize, RENOVATION GRAN VÍA, “Delirious Gran Vía”, Madrid, Spain, 2010.
- First Prize, “PANAYIOTI MIXELI Award”. SADAS-PEA, for the Spreading of Knowledge of Architecture Athens, 2005.
- First Prize, “SANTIAGO AMÓN Award," for the Spreading of Knowledge of Architecture. 2000.
- Award, “PIERRE VAGO Award." ICAC -International committee of Art Critics. London, 2005.
- First Prize, C.O.A.M. Madrid, 2000. Shortlisted, World Architecture Festival. Centro de Investigación e Interpretación de los Ríos. Tera, Esla y Orbigo, Barcelona, 2008.
- First Prize. FAD AWARD 07 Ephemeral Interventions. “M.C.ESCHER”. Arquin-Fad. Barcelona, Sapin 2007.
