Designblog

Purple Rain

I had to look for another book based on the keywords of 40 years of Chinese rock’n’roll. First I tried all my chosen tags. But nothing came out of it, so I just typed in Rock and then I got the title The art of Rock. I found the book easily. But the first thing I noticed when I actually saw the book was the weight of it.
The colour purple remind me the most of royalty and Prince. Maybe the two things go together. Prince has something royal in his way of performing. On the book cover the colour white turns into deep deep purple. The hair exists out of flames. If you look long enough you can read: the art of rock posters from Presley to punk. I saw the cover maybe 15 times but never saw the text into the fire hair flames. That’s some nice graphic art work! My first thought was that the man on the cover is still smiling with his head over his shoulder, but his hair is fire? Also he looked pretty pleased with himself. Most people whose hair is on fire don’t smile that cool. So is it sacrifice for being cool or is he just being stupid?

Tina Turner also smiling over her shoulder but with some more sexiness and joy. Wearing clothes that you normally don’t wear to the supermarket.

But then Jimmy Hendrix his hair turned into snakes.

There are some similar connections between these 3 pictures. But there are also other images on the back of the cover. I have to mention the rolling stones with the two falling dices poster. Because I have to mention them.

Rietveld Library cat.nr: 754.1


The location was given: it was a triangle shaped empty area at the Wibautstraat in Amsterdam where now only grass and trees can be found. The area is bordered by the railway, a bridge and a tunnel. They are important as the main parts of the surrounding which we had to take into consideration as well.
I chose the Rietveld-Schroder house as the starting point of my idea. The facade of the building consists of different basic geometrical elements, which seem to float freely on the surface of the building. The street side of the house has much in common with the minimalist, so-called Neo-plasticist paintings of Piet Mondrian, although the relation of the two, who influenced who, is not clear and it is very much likely that they developed their works independently.

This free variation of elements gives us the feeling that the house could be turned on any side and still remains an autonomous object.
Inspired by these characteristics I set out to develop my own construction made up by hovering elements, more sort of an installation of different objects than a habitable architectural building. The structure is supposed to give us the feeling of interchangeability rather than solidity.
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