Designblog

After visiting the treasure room of the NAi I was very inspired by a non-existing student houses from Jan Verhoeven [x]. A very strong image of a wooden model caught my attention.

For the student residence in the campus Drienerlo the architect Jan Verhoeven devised a smart structure. He designed an easy structure that gets stronger when you build more houses. This sketches of the plan from 1965 are very colorful, colored squares represent the layered houses. Mathematical drawings with different structures, some a-symmetric some not. The sketches give me the feeling of mandalas, the spiritual drawings that suppose to give you rest and peace. It reminded me also of the patterns my great-grandmother used for making embroiderys.
This all sounds very warm and cozy, but when you look at the drawings it's still a bit cold because of the straight and perfect lines and squares.
What i wanted to do was to make a booklet, make this drawings into embroidery and give this the warm feeling it reminded me of. The process of making the embroiderys give you the same peaceful feeling as making and looking at mandalas. Also the fabric is getting stronger When you stitch more layers, the same as the original idea from the student residence. In the booklet I also tried to preserve the atmosphere of the model with using the wood board and keeping the clean image. The text in the booklet are keywords that represent the essence of the project from Jan Verhoeven, but also three separate titles of the embroiderys.

“subjective library” on Flickr

click on the images above to find some of the tags as we translated them into images for you. If you want to check them all out go to …… Flikcr.com /subjective library /click people link

selection made by Matthias Kreutzer and Henk Groenendijk

Folklore in Portugal is an Artistic Manifestation that really influenced portugese society.

Since genarations ago until the present days people still doing the Folklore Parade, during these celebration everybody in the country goes to the street to become part of this show. Here everybody can see the costumes, the sybolic objects, the music, food, drinks, villages party’s.

I found a connection between the folklore from Portugal and from The Netherlands because they both developed embroidering techniques in women dresses. These dresses are worked by hand so everything is embroidered carefully in a really illustrative way. We can notice that similarity in both cultures, through the shapes, drawings, the geometric forms, waves, spots, flowers, leaves and hearts. All the colours are always really strong, red, blue, beige, yellows, black and green and the background colour white or black, depending of the social women’s situation.

Most of these women use the folklore to express themselves with their own dress, for each costume they have a different meaning and a really particular taste. Most of the time these costumes are based on social habits, the agriculture, family, society and politics, which caused these embroided dresses to become a piece of history.