Design CommissionsDesign Commissions

Spatial designer Eric Roelen has been involved in several exhibitions at Het Nieuwe Instituut, including The Ruin (2013), the Rotterdam Innovation Market (2015), _Sleep Mode _(2017), and Habitat: Expanding Architecture (2018) and in the design of the entrance, foyer and Het Nieuwe Cafe.

Eric Roelen's first contribution to Het Nieuwe Instituut's programme was the design for the exhibition The Ruin - a commission he completed in collaboration with designer and artist Frank Bruggeman. "After graduating from the Willem de Kooning Academy, Frank took me under his wing as an apprentice," he explains. With Bruggeman, Roelen discovered that designing exhibitions - a profession he'd never considered before - suited him well.

_The Ruin_ was an inaugural collection of exhibition fragments for Het Nieuwe Instituut. "The starting point for our design was the framework for the last exhibition of the Netherlands Architecture Institute [Het Nieuwe Instituut's predecessor]. We were completely free to find out what that transformation from the old to the new era could look like. We revealed the construction by sawing pieces from the walls of the old walls. We dismantled the white cube and focused on the beauty of the underlying building structure. We used the sheet material that became available to build new spaces for the eight small presentations that together formed The Ruin. We moulded the existing layout into a new exhibition space with its own identity."

Roelen says this way of working typifies his subsequent designs for Het Nieuwe Instituut. He has fond memories of the exhibition design for the _New Material Award 2014_. "The design also arose from a form of reuse. There's a company that buys up discarded exhibition material, where we found a series of large blocks that I took as the starting point for my design. The nominated designers had very different requests, such as a construction for a hanging lamp, flat presentation surfaces or exhibiting on different elevations. The challenge was to build the exhibition from these blocks in combination with different materials that suited each participant. Each presentation took on its own form."

_The Rotterdam Innovation Market _was an outdoor exhibition in Het Nieuwe Instituut's arcade. It was an interesting project for Roelen because he had to do a lot with limited resources. And there were many restrictions because the exhibition was in public space. "I used the arcade's paving pattern as a template. Tiles were stacked or placed in a steel frame to serve as display tables. The presentations were all bounded between Heras fencing, which created different shaped islands within the paving pattern."

Roelen designed mobile information boards for the entrance and foyer. "I like the raw, unintentional aesthetic of simple building elements and techniques, such as the cloudy pattern from sealing plasterboard seams and screws. I used that casual, playful effect in a series of poster stands. For the media centre in the garage of Sonneveld House, I used beautiful black-painted MDF sheets. The result was a simple and understated design, befitting of the Sonneveld House museum's chic allure."

His most recent project is a new bar for Het Nieuwe Café. He was commissioned to design a bar that isn't a bar. Again, the choice of material and construction technique determine the final appearance. "It has become a kind of ship made of masonry bricks with a concrete slab on top. The concrete was a mammoth challenge because it had to be done within a very limited timeframe. The edges were worn with a diamond cutter to reveal the pebbles in the concrete." The sturdy bar with its rough appearance has been meticulously designed and executed. "I always wonder while designing, whether it's interesting and good enough. Did I get all I could get out of it? You have an idea, draw it on the computer, implement it, and at some point, it's there. Quite a few ideas die during this process, but sometimes some elements turn out better and stronger than I would have dared to think."

The critical consideration for Raphael Rozendaal's _Sleep Mode: The Art of the Screensaver _was the viewer's experience of the screensavers. "We eventually developed a presentation in which the visitor was absorbed, as it were, into the world of screensavers." This experience was achieved by showing the screensavers as full wall projections with mirrored flooring to reflect the images.

Eric Sebastiaan Roelen (1982) is a spatial designer. He graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academy and lives and works in Rotterdam.

Website Eric Roelen