Maurer United is nominated for the Casa Nova 2010 Award! Don’t hestitate and help Maurer United win the public vote prize by clicking here. Vote for CIAM200plus, entry number 6 .! Thanks..
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Nicole Maurer is going to coordinate the educational programme of the third grade and graduate students of the Maastricht Academy for Architecture. She will work on a part-time appointment during the coming four years as so-called Supermaster. This in addition to her main focus as director and architect at Maurer United. Follow her also at Linkedin.
Today, we are confronted with many developments that have a huge influence on architecture. In the fields of finance, ecology and media many changes take place. In relation to media, two questions are of special interest to us. (more…)
DutchDFA is organizing a Dutch design mission to Business of Design Week in Hong Kong and consecutively Guangzhou Design Week from December 2 to 11, 2010. During this period DutchDFA is presenting a Dutch Design pavilion at the Guangzhou Design Week. The design by Maurer United works as a 3D Mondriaan painting (500m2).
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If one takes the painting of Theo van Doesburg ‘Contra-Compositie met dissonanten XVI’ from 1925 and translates it to a spatial composition, a new experience of the work will be generated.
In this case the painting is transformed into several architectural bodies of different heights. The total size of the floor plan is 42×24 meters.
The little village can be built of tents. The scale is optimized so the tents can easily be filled with standard units of 3×6 metres. In between the tents narrow passages come into being (the black stripes in the original composition). The architectural sculpture can provide accommodation to shops, galleries, offices or housing.
The inside space in between the modular units and the tents can be illuminated with (colored) lights according to the original composition. Sensors can measure movements of visitors in the buildings. The more intense the movement, the more the sculptures will illuminate in the original colors. Visitors experience what it is like to move through a ‘De Stijl’ painting.
The ‘Case Studies’ project is a utopian architecture project by Maurer United Architects [MUA] that is being developed under the umbrella of BALTAN’s Poème Numérique research programme. For one year, MUA has developed one utopian idea every month, resulting into twelve different sketches.
In 1962 the renowned Dutch architect, graphic designer and furniture designer Gerrit Rietveld designed a billboard with a shelter for the City of Eindhoven. The design was only produced after Rietveld’s death in 1964, but for various reasons was never used for its originally envisioned purpose. As a result, as years went on, no one could remember why the structure existed and who had made it. Like so many objects in public space, it lived on in anonymity.
At the end of the 1980s, the Rietveld billboard was rediscovered and received a new location and a new function. It never actually became a bus stop either, but did become a place where artists, designers and architects could show their work or realise a special project.
From November 2010 until November 2011, artist Geert Mul and Maurer United Architects transform Rietveld Bus Stop. They were inspired by the map of Eindhoven made out of mosaic tiles and located on the wall under the roof of the bus stop. It is one of the first city maps in public space. The square tiles from which the map is constructed give the image a pixellated character that echoes the early imagery of the computer age. In this design, Rietveld strayed from the typical red, yellow and blue colours of De Stijl. With the colours he chose to use, he inadvertently made a connection to the television and computer era.
This contrast between traditional colour mixing (Red-Yellow-Blue) and additive colour mixing (Red-Green-Blue) marks the transition from a pre-media era to the media era for Mul and Maurer United. For them, this was the motivation to explore the Rietveld Bus Stop as a physical manifestation of the media era. They replaced the original fluorescent lights in the column with LED lights in red, green and blue. Through the colour change of the LED lights, various layered images are made visible on the column. This interplay between light and image creates unexpected experiences and multi-layered messages.
The images in the top part of the column refer to universal worldviews and colour systems, including those of De Stijl and Albert Munsell, an American painter who developed a system to numerically describe colours. The Germanic worldview in the form of a tree of life and a thermographic image of earth taken from a satellite are also shown here. In the middle panels, colour models are explored through architectural forms. In the bottom of the column we find images of media in which colour systems are applied: the screen, the television, the CD and the Pantone colour wheel. The practical counterparts of the universal systems in the top of the column are represented in the bottom. The column as a whole deconstructs these ‘universal’ colour models and the way in which they take form in our daily lives.
On a yearly basis since 1990, the ‘Rietveld Bus Stop Foundation’ invites someone from the artworld to develop a project for the ‘Rietveld Bus Stop’. This year they invited Christiane Berndes, curator at the Van Abbemuseum. She worked together with Baltan Laboratories, and together with Angela Plohman, director of Baltan, they collaborated with artists Geert Mul and Maurer United Architects to temporarily transform the ‘Rietveld Bus Stop’.
This project was made possible thanks to the support of the Social Development department of the City of Eindhoven.
BALTAN IN THE BUS STOP
DE STIJL versus RGB
A project by Geert Mul and Maurer United Architects
for the Rietveld Bus Stop, Stadhuisplein, Eindhoven
(November 2010 – November 2011)
By assignment of the Eindhoven ‘Stichting Bushalte van Rietveld’, Christiane Berndes (Van Abbemuseum) and Angela Plohman (Baltan Laboratories) have chosen media artist Geert Mul and architects Maurer United to transform the Eindhoven Bus Stop, designed by Gerrit Rietveld, for a certain period.
The result is the installation ‘DE STIJL vs. RGB’. The pictures show the construction site, more info about this project as soon it is in use… .
