The installation Pretty Vacant encourages visitors to take a fresh look at the empty spaces of the Centraal Museum. The blue window literally and figuratively sheds a new light on the space and complements the architecture of this medieval chapel. The window is based on the ‘negative spaces’ of RAAAF’s earlier installation Vacant NL, which was the Dutch submission for the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010. The installation in the Gerrit Rietveld-designed pavilion in Venice showed the enormous potential of 10,000 disused public buildings in the Netherlands from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries.
The Centraal Museum aims to acquire work of what its director Edwin Jacobs calls “new-thinkers in images” at the intersection of art and architecture. Through the acquisition of this installation by RAAAF with support from the Mondriaan Fund, the Centraal Museum has realized its ambition of adding Vacant NL to the ‘Collectie Nederland’.
External information:
<<< Vacant NL, Venice Architecture Biennale 2010
>>> Mondriaan fonds
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Client: Centraal Museum Utrecht
Design: RAAAF
Design team: Ronald and Erik Rietveld, Arna Mackic, Francois Lombarts
Construction : Landstra & De Vries en Claus Wiersma
Location: Centraal Museum Utrecht
Status: completion 2013
Photography: Rob 't Hart