Design Commissions
Tomas Dirrix was the spatial designer of the exhibitions REBOOT. Pioneering Digital Art in 2023 and Archives at Risk in 2024.
An initiative of the Nieuwe Instituut and platform for media art LI-MA, the REBOOT exhibition celebrated the rich history of digital art and culture in the Netherlands. Visitors were taken through four storylines along the artistic questions of the past and the techno-social questions of today: on the utopia of the internet, online identity, aesthetic development and the cooperation between humans and computers. In addition, the curators asked nine makers to create a new work: a vision of the future exploring the role of technology in society, inspired by one of the key works.
Atelier Tomas Dirrix is an architecture practice with a collective desire to build spaces that are attentive to the environment.
The practice was founded in 2017 after winning the Meesterproef competition for emerging Belgian and Dutch architects, organised by the Vlaams Bouwmeester. In respectively 2018 and 2019 Atelier Tomas Dirrix won the Unfair Architect Award and received the ARC19 Young Architect Award.
"We start each project by looking at what is already there. By taking into account and enabling different kinds of sensitivities, conditions and initiatives, we aim to find new perspectives and reimagine what is possible. Building is a collective effort. With a growing team as our base we actively explore possibilities for collaboration, methods of realisation and forms of application. We like to work together with specialists. Through a thoughtful integration of expertise from partner offices in each phase of the project we can establish new principles, relationships and processes as a basis for realising a regenerative architecture."
Archives at Risk
For Dutch Design Week (22 to 30 October), Network Archives Design and Digital Culture (NADD), a consortium of 40 Dutch institutions coordinated by Nieuwe Instituut, presented the exhibition Archives at Risk in the Microlab Hall in Eindhoven.
The five archives on display were those of the architect, furniture designer and industrial designer Emile Truijen (whose archive is still being kept by his heirs, pending a formal allocation); graphic designer Lies Ros (who lives in her own design archive and collection); industrial designer Hella Jongerius (who expects parts of her well-maintained archive to go abroad, in the absence of a Dutch option); textile artists Jason Page and Karen Huang (who work and live with the archive of textile artist Elma Beks); and textile designer Borre Akkersdijk (who in his practice treats a digital archive as a shared resource). The exhibition also showcased photos of the archives by Johannes Schwartz, as well as conversations with the designers and heirs by curator Annemartine van Kesteren of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. An insightful installation by social designer Manon van Hoeckel illustrated the pain of losing this rich source of knowledge.