Pretty Vacant by Dutch design and research office Rietveld Landscape has built an arched foam screen with hundreds of building-shaped holes inside a disused chapel at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht. The installation encourages visitors to take a fresh look at the museum’s ‘empty’ spaces.
The window is based on the ‘negative spaces’ of Rietveld Landscape’s earlier installation Vacant.nl, which was the Dutch submission for the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010. The installation in the Rietveld-designed pavilion in Venice proposed innovative uses for 10,000 disused public buildings in the Netherlands from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. In the formerly unused space in the museum highlighted in Pretty Vacant, the Centraal Museum is exhibiting a changing selection of objects from the museum’s collection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century applied arts and design. Through the acquisition of this installation by Rietveld Landscape with support from the Mondriaan Fund, the Centraal Museum has realised its ambition of adding Vacant NL to the ‘Collectie Nederland’.
Dates.- 18 May 2013 until 31 January 2014
Venue.- Centraal Museum. Nicolaaskerkhof 10, 3512 XC Utrecht. Netherlands.
