Landmark Textile Museum

The Textile Museum is located in a cluster of former textile factories that consists of the Mommers complex and the Drögepand. The Growth Monument adds a new element to this complex and explicitly highlights the relationship between the past, present, and future. The monumental quality of the buildings is being continued outdoors by the placement of the growth monument. The rich history related to texture in the city of Tilburg can therefore be experienced both inside and outside. As a symbol for the city, the living Growth Monument is continuously subject to change and will become another part of the city’s history.

A platform traversing the volume of piles connects the interior space of the museum with the surrounding courtyard. The Growth Monument is hereby connected to its surroundings and becomes an indication point in the continuous space around the Mommers 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. The volume of pipes represents the past of the city of Tilburg and turns it into a visible experience in the present, the platform forms the symbolic step towards the future.

The Growth Monument derives its shape from the high factory buildings; a repetition of the structure of the former textile factories on the museum site. The monument is not a massive volume, but rather a transparent open structure, that consists of 252 glass fiber tubes that move gently in the wind. In collaboration with Copijn Landscape Architects, a strategic planting plan has been developed, so that the monument changes colour every season. The dynamic of nature brings the monument to life.