Currently on display until January 31, 2014, the ‘Pretty Vacant’ installation by design and research studio Rietveld Landscape encourages visitors to take a fresh look at the empty spaces of the Centraal Museum in The Netherlands. The blue window literally and figuratively sheds a new light on the space and complements the architecture of this medieval chapel. More images and architects’ description after the break.
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’s 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 realized its ambition of adding ‘Vacant NL’ to the ‘Collectie Nederland’.
For more information on the installation, please visit here.
