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Type: Public space / Art Location: Tilburg Client: KORT; Municipality Tilburg Team: Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers, Joost Lemmens, Geoffrey Moote Floor area / size: 36 sqm Cost: Euro 90.000,00 Status: Completed

2010-03-01 growth monument officially opened 2009-09-01 Start construction 2008-01-12 Restart

A monument to represent the blossoming and flourishing of the city of Tilburg, a ‘textielgroeimonument’ (textile growth monument), realized at the Textielmuseum Tilburg in 2009 as part of the celebration of the 200^th anniversary of the city. Since the Mommerscomplex that accommodates the textile museum is metaphorically speaking a living monument, would it perhaps be possible to create a growing monument that is literally built up from living matter?

The new volume can be read as an addition to the industrial complex: a shape that brings to mind the high factory buildings; a reprise of the building structure of the textile museum.

The overgrowth lends to the monument the dynamics of nature. It literally grows, and this ensures that it always looks alive. It is not a massive volume but a transparent, open structure.

A platform connects the interior space with the courtyard. It provides a possible connection to the monument and a starting point in the open space around the complex. It facilitates encounters and exchanges and in doing so it adopts the part of accelerator in the creative public domain that is currently being developed in Goirkestraat. And so as the volume turns the past into a visible experience in the present, the platform is the first step towards the future.

Type: Folly Location: Carnisselande Client: Municipality Barendrecht Team: Marijn Schenk, Bart Reuser, Michel Schreinemachers with Joost Lemmens, Marieke Spits, Anne Ricard, Agata Piet Material: steel Cost: 200000 Construction: ABT adviesbureau voor Bouwtechniek Start building: june 2010 Completion: december 2010 Status: Final design

2009-03-18 Impossible stair for Carnisselande

The design consists of a circular stair which leads the visitor up to a height that allows an unhindered view of the horizon. The path makes a continuous movement and thereby draws on the context of the heavy infrastructural surroundings of ring road and tram track. While a tram stop presents the end or the start of a journey, the route of the stairway is endless.

The continuity and endlessness have a double meaning, however. Because the stair is based on the principal of the Moebius ring, is has only one surface and can only exist as a three-dimensional object. Upside becomes underside becomes upside. The suggestion of a continuous route is therefore, in the end, an impossibility: Far away, so close.

Because of its structure the shape of the object is hard to perceive; every perspective generates a new image with which the design is not only a contextual but also a very literal answer to the given context of the local art plan: an Elastic Perspective.

Type: Art Location: Zoetermeer Client: Municipality Zoetermeer Team: Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers with Joost Lemmens, Rolf Pederson Cost: Euro 90.000,00

Our proposal for the Water Theatre on the Oostkade in Zoetermeer, 6 metres below sea level, takes the form of an intervention in public space; however, the intervention is not meant to be the actual work of art, but to make art out of a public space: a theatre. 

We will widen the stairway from the dike to the water to act as a grandstand. A curtain that responds to the presence of passers-by, to on-lookers, will frame the view. The proposed dock will extend further into the water. It is a potential podium, but in a much stronger sense, real life is the podium.  

The curtain is a permanent screen of flowing water; 6 metres high. It shows manifestly how the polder is situated in relation to sea level. The flowing water dramatises the level of the polder. When closed, the curtain acts like a shutter, obscuring the view offered from the Oostkade of the canal and the houses. The curtain is linked to sensors in the bank that respond when a passer-by takes a step onto the bank. Then the curtain opens in front of the visitor, suddenly showing a view of the waterway. Everyday, familiar reality suddenly becomes a work of art: reality is art.

Type: Pavilion Client: Arboretum Kalmthout Team: Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers, John van de Water Cost: Euro 16.000,00 Competition: 2nd prize Status: Competition

Papilio is a pavilion for a butterfly garden in the Arboretum Kalmthout, Belgium. The concept for the pavilion was instigated by the metamorphosis of a butterfly.  

A flexible wooden construction is transformed, section by section, from a simple square to an open space covered by a wing; in this spot, the visitor can find information about butterflies, take shelter from the weather, rest a bit, and enjoy a beautiful panorama over the garden, all the while engaging in a special spatial experience.

Type: Pumping station Location: Amsterdam Client: dRO Amsterdam Team: Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers, John van de Water Competition: Honourable mention

This is a design for a public utility building: a sewage-pumping station. Utilitarian buildings are junctions in the invisible infrastructure of a city and therefore crucial for its function. But since they house machines rather than people, they have no relation with people and thereby often have no relation with their surroundings. 

In an attempt to create this relation between the building and the surroundings, we added a second function to the pumping station, that of skate landscape. The shape is the result of a superimposition of the sewer station and regular skate elements.

The functional form generates an attractive sculptural quality and represents the dynamics of the program, both inside and out.

Type: Public Space / Art Location: Almere Client: Stichting Bosland Team: Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers, John van de Water with Stan Wagter, Marrit deJong Cost: Euro 1.000.000,00 Competition: 3rd Prize Status: On hold

design for 1 hectare ‘museum’-forest

This is not a design for a new forest but an operation that puts the existing forest in a new perspective. Just like a museum designer is unconcerned with museological objects as such, but rather focuses on the way people look at them, we took this assignment as a chance to transform the woods into a woods museum by creating the possibility of a new kind of perception. 

Adding a circular path with a 100-m diameter provides the woods with an extra dimension. On one end, the path reaches a height of 35 m and provides a view of the horizon, on the other end it drops to 3 m underground so people can experience the woods at ant height. The raised end of the path encloses a section of the woods and this creates an exceptional spot. The hectare of woodland that is shut in by the path will remain unkempt and transform into primeval forest, which makes it an example of the transformations woods may undergo through the years.

Over the past 27 years, the woods, which was originally a poplar plantation, has already developed into a highly varied section of forest, full of different types of plants, trees and animals. The process can be observed from the different levels of the circular path over the years: from bird’s-eye view to worm perspective. Creating the circular path requires a total of approximately 42 km of bamboo consisting of 18,750 trunks of 2.2 m long. We are still looking for financing.