The Brooklyn Rail

Petra Blaisse has spent four decades transforming spaces through textiles, landscapes, and installations. She is the founder of Inside Outside, now operated with partners Jana Crepon and Aura Luz Melis. Her new book Art Applied is a dense tome dedicated to the craft and fulfilling explorations her practice engages in. She collaborates with architects, engineers, and biologists. Speaking with her reminded me that her work, despite being on the periphery of architecture, has actually shifted its core. Her curtains— technical marvels often masked as atmosphere or beauty—challenge architectural rigidity and open new pathways for the discipline.

Nile Greenberg (Rail): In Art Applied, you loosely describe your work as an “advisor for atmosphere,” which I thought was a very pleasant phrase for what you do. What do you think that means—an advisor for atmosphere?

Petra Blaisse: I guess I’m describing one of the things we do here, and not the only thing we do. Advisory on atmosphere is a lot about color and light, both of which I think the atmosphere is very much influenced naturally by. Curtains can regulate these aspects, and also often add a presence that has an acoustic effect which is also part of the atmosphere.

[Picks up phone] Hi Niels, I’m in an interview. I’ll call you back. Okay, bye.

It’s Niels Olsen. That’s why I picked up, because we made this book together with Fredi Fischli and Teo Schifferli. And of course we became friends along the way, which made it such an intense and funny way of working. We had four years of fun.

Rail: How does making a book in that way compare to making other work? Are books a very different process from making a special curtain or a mirrored umbrella?

Blaisse: It’s looking at all the work the studio touched upon—trying to put into words the essence of everything that you show or talk about. Choosing the right images is both difficult and exciting, because we either have too few or thousands of images, taken while we are developing ideas, while on the building site, sewing or testing things. Since the mobile phone we always take pictures. With forty years of work, it would take a few years to go through everything and at the same time a careful selection is key. Some things are less interesting than others. Sometimes we chose to show one spread and sometimes eight spreads. With one spread you have to choose one vertical image. I can tell you, we had a lot of discussions! Because they were outsiders to the practice but well informed on art and architecture—as teachers, curators, and editors—they looked at our work in a totally different way.

They were keen to make an overview of my and the studio’s work; first as an exhibition, then in the form of a book. They called it a retrospective. And I said, “Retrospective—excuse me? We’re not done yet. Let’s call it the other thing, prospective, or whatever.”

Some people really don’t like the book at first sight. It’s large and overwhelming. Too much information, too many projects, no hierarchy, what is important, what’s not important. That drives some people crazy. I was really shocked. I thought most people must like this book—colorful and energetic, full of ideas. But no, not necessarily.

Rail: You really don’t know where to get into it. For anyone who knows your work and what you participate in, it’s amazing; because you can really get in it, and see all these scraps from other things. The work has actually seemed to shift how architects practice, and how architects think of design in general. Your curtains, for which you are probably most known, are highly technical objects, but also containers for these impossible architectural problems. You have, I think, allowed architecture to take on new forms because of the way you’ve been able to approach these beautiful objects as technical ones, and release rooms from certain necessities.

Blaisse: I remember when what I call “blob architecture” started to come on, thanks to the computer. And I would say, “Look, we can do what you do much better, and more interestingly. Because our “blobs,” the billowing curtains that enter and go in and out of a building, are easier to make and change shape all the time, so they are alive, while your blob architecture pretends to be soft and pretends to move, but it doesn’t. It’s completely stiff!” That’s still what I think is the most interesting, that you can’t control what happens. A curtain is under the influence of wear and tear, climate, air flow; things just happen to it. It can also be easily taken away. With curtains, you can escape the shape of the architecture. That was very important for us, to have a certain muscle in these curtains, add technical inventiveness and presence, emancipate from architecture and not only let it be about beauty.

Rail: I think the emancipatory quality you’re talking about is not something that is done by only thinking about beauty. It’s about developing new problems to solve that demand new techniques.

Blaisse: It’s a perpetual education and exploration of the possibilities of weaves, or non-wovens, from linen to plastic to all the extremes, and all depends on scale. You start to understand what the yarn does, and what the effect of coloring has on the subtle suppleness or the stiffness, how the scale and mass influences the weight, the movement, the behavior. We’re now exploring possibilities with biologists and the textile lab that we have here in Tilburg in the Netherlands to see if we can develop a knit or weave of a certain yarn that absorbs moisture and air to allow living elements, spores and bacteria, to settle and start to grow. We can make a living curtain. And it’s really exciting, because, of course it has to become beautiful, and that’s the big question: how to compose and let go at the same time.

Rail: You’ve had opportunities to work with so many different architects, very good ones. What do you think the state of architecture is right now? How do you see the architect’s job changing?

Blaisse: It’s a difficult question, but an important question, because I feel it’s not going very well with the architecture profession. The culture of “Starchitects” has not helped much, on the contrary I think: it isolated and elevated a small group of architects that discovers that this “recognition” triggers negative emotions and exclusion of normal communication and friendships with colleagues. It at the same time humiliates all other hardworking professionals that also do their job with passion and know-how, often creating environments of beauty and quality that improve our environment.

Through the current politics, here in the West, investing in quality and longevity is no longer supported. On the one hand, the market economy forces the architect to work quickly and with limited budgets, reducing the possibilities for in-depth research and investment in craftsmanship. On the other hand, security measures have grown out of proportion in all our fields, suppressing inventiveness, innovation and originality. Then there is the issue of sustainability, inviting architects to use recycled and natural materials in a new way and to create buildings with a “minimal footprint.” To combine these requirements with convincing, contemporary, inventive techniques and materials is a quest.

The (in principle very welcome) environmental regulations cause many delays in the housing sector here in Europe, as builders need to reconsider their construction methods, machinery and materials. These slow-down procedures are often devastating for architecture offices that work in that section.

Here in the Netherlands lately, architects and creatives are only hired to create a concept and schematic design. After the “idea” is drawn up, the project is given to the contractor, who has his own “feasibility” logic, introducing his own technical solutions and detailing with the consent of the commissioner. So, the architect’s work today is more often than not considered as a base for interpretation by the builders.

As we all know, careful detailing is of great influence on the quality of the work. Every little thing is important. You can’t hand this over to someone else.

And last but not least: the fact that the architect is no longer considered an experienced, creative intellectual, valuable to be involved in the political and cultural debate, degrades the profession to one of limited scope, forced to obey a narrow-minded system.

Rail: I think the United States is slightly different. Maybe it never had the “all in” and was always a corporate enterprise. I see especially younger architects take different paths to architecture. Often, one of them is to opt out of the complexity, opt out of the solutions-oriented work. I’m not judging any of these but I’m interested in how you think of the multiplicity of crises and many impossible problems we are faced with.

Blaisse: Issues. We say issues, not problems. I think complex issues are actually really exciting and important to unravel. We did an installation in the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012, in the Dutch Rietveld Pavilion, on the issue of vacant buildings. It connected to the urgency of reuse, restoration, and repurposing of existing vacant buildings. For the younger generation like you, that is really an interesting given, to address a lifeless building and bring it back to life.

For Inside Outside, in this time of COVID, work in all its flexible and program-solving forms falls into place. The idea of the curtain as a tool for temporary division or isolation, both at home and on the work floor; the direct connection of interior to nature by re-introducing plant life in the work space, opening up to patios and gardens to work, to meet, to think. It all came together.

Rail: It’s a move away from new construction. So many things were going in the opposite direction, because post-war modernism was really about re-building so many cities, of which Rotterdam is an infamous example. How did you encounter modernism?

Blaisse: I was brought up in Europe with a Catholic upbringing. Catholic churches in France, Portugal, and Austria are classic, highly decorated structures with expressive stained glass windows, prayers spoken in Latin and lots of space-filling song and music. There’s paintings and sculptures and drama, with this fantastic figure called Jesus everywhere, and images of Heaven and Hell. As a child, these images really enter your system. By contrast, we were taken to boxing and wrestling matches, to dance performances. We were introduced to the mathematical and colorless buildings by Josef Hoffmann, the organic and fiercely colourful works of Friedensreich Hundertwasser, elegant designs by the Wiener Werkstätte and paintings by Gustav Klimt, Paul Klee, Egon Schiele. My interest in art in general was awakened.

My mother was a painter and a potter, and she was very interested in modernity; in modern art but also in Surrealism. My father was a businessman who worked internationally. When my brother and I were teenagers, he took us to New York, to see the musical Hair. He also showed us the Lever Brothers building by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where he worked. I thought it was such an amazing building! It was then, I think, that my interest in modern architecture started.

After high school I went to art school, but always felt that I was really not an artist, not in the sense of being on my own and creating. In my early twenties, I started working at the Stedelijk Museum as an assistant in the applied arts department. That was exactly the right place to be for me, surrounded by art in all situations, perfectly exhibited but also in exhibitions in the making with Alberto Giacometti sculptures spread over the floor on a blanket, paintings leaning against the wall, rolled through the rooms by art handlers, the Sol LeWitt team drawing straight on the walls. It was fantastic. In my function, I watched and learnt how to exhibit objects in a vitrine, how to hang works on the wall or in space, how and where to add texts, how to organize light. One time, when I helped install Gerrit Rietveld study models in a wall-vitrine—some models were made of paper and so small that they could fit in your hand—I suggested exhibiting them in front of a mirror to also see the back sides. At the museum, I learnt about how to make space in a space that isn’t actually there, with light and reflection.

Rail: At some point you started doing some exhibitions yourself, curating and designing them.

Blaisse: I met Rem Koolhaas and the whole OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) London team at the Stedelijk Museum in 1980. I left the museum in 1986 and started to work as free-lance exhibition designer, soon invited by the OMA office in Rotterdam to help design and organize their exhibitions. I acted as curator and started uncovering all their sketches and study models, collecting and organizing them, taking every single “idea sketch” seriously.

We formed a team of young creatives that worked on all their early exhibitions and sometimes also on presentations for competitions. The first was for the competition they did for the City Hall in the Hague, as did Richard Meier, along with a lot of others. The works of the selected architects were exhibited at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, inviting the larger public to give their reactions. For that installation it was very important to think about how to present and communicate the intentions of a design, how to show a model, a series of drawings and impressions in an explanatory manner (in a very small room) to inhabitants of the city in question, not necessarily interested in architecture as an art form.

The OMA exhibitions that followed between 1988 and 1992 generally developed as sequences of experiences, leading people from one room and impression to the next, as if through a landscape. Working with the then small OMA team and involving artists, photographers, and designers, Koolhaas oversaw the entirety. We worked day and night for nothing but with great pleasure and imagination, in-between also working on the making of the Nederlands Dans Theater in the Hague.

Rail: Your work is similarly about taking the given constraints of a room or a building or a facade, and trying to represent it. I want to go back for a second to your visiting New York, seeing Hair and the Lever House. My understanding is that those things were oppositional, the corporate modernist against the counterculture free love show—its revelatory thinking about how those were happening at the same time. To that end, there’s an interesting rediscovery of modernism having potential emancipatory qualities. Rem in particular started looking at modernism’s emancipatory nature.

Blaisse: In our work on curtains, people always make a comparison with Lilly Reich. I didn’t know of her work, strangely enough, until much later. Because of the re-occurrence of this comment, I started to study Reich’s use and placement of textiles, and there’s indeed a lot of connotations there. But the elegant and influential spaces she creates with beautiful pieces of cloth are not about movement and not about change or chance. And it didn’t evolve much into different forms of being through time. Where we work towards the emancipation of the curtain, hers seem to complement Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s architecture in a beautiful manner.

Rail: There’s a whole history of women who are sidelined by institutions and art and architecture, forcing them to take on positions that are tangential. Lilly is one of them, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky another, and both very brave, of course. It seems as if it was a pure force of will that these women had to participate in the project despite every objection.

Blaisse: These women made fantastic things out of yarn, clay, glass, and pigments, considered as unique pieces or made for serial production. In my time at the museum of modern art, this work was named “applied art.” Of course many textile artists protested against this labelling.

Rail: I think people are looking again at graphic design, fashion, and textile. It’s a very divided art world. If you’re not a painter, or a sculptor, or a video artist, you’re actually cut off from the economics of it. Now, people are trying to bring applied arts into the art world. The switch on the title, Art Applied, implies that this is an art form that’s integrated with life. It’s relevant.

Blaisse: Niels and Fredi asked Rem to give a lecture about Petra Blaisse and Inside Outside during our installation in Gottfried Semper’s ETH Swiss Federal Institute of Technology building in Zurich, in 2018. He was really nervous to say, after all these years, what our work actually represents for him, for OMA, in architecture. He gave a beautiful lecture that ended with the conclusion that what we do is not design. Design is Marcel Wanders, Hella Jongerius, it is something else. He named what we contribute to architecture and the living environment “applied work.” For the title of our book, we changed the two words around: the title became Art Applied. Less obedient.

Rail: It is different from design, especially since Dutch design is so codified now. You use shifting scales and graphics that are small but become big, and big that become small. These are really interesting games. I am thinking of the scaled-up gold leaf graphics in Sala Suggia of Casa da Música in Porto, or the expo hall in Lille. You drew your hand on this model of a curtain. It’s just these hands—

Blaisse: Pushing the wall away—

Rail: And there’s just a wall behind it.

Blaisse: At the beginning of a project, there is no architecture. There are program analyses, diagrams, sketches; then there are floor plans, then later there are sections. In the meantime, you have to imagine the future space on the base of almost nothing, long before it takes shape. You think of a color and make little swatches, envisioning their place and scale, shifting them around and discussing their potential for days. Color is so different if it’s on the cover of a book, a whole wall, a floor, or a ceiling. It’s not only about place and scale, but about the whole character and experience of a space.

We made these garden carpets for the exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2000, printing photographs of plants on a very cheap carpet. It had an enormous effect. People hardly dared to walk in and step on it. We also put up a curtain outside that covered the whole facade, seventeen-meters high and billowing in the wind. We made live grass cushions and put them on the sidewalk. Everything was kind of turned around. Later, we applied the idea of the garden carpet in the Seattle Central Library with OMA.

A picture of a plant looks green-ish, but when scanned on the computer, it’s built up of 257 colors. If you print on a carpet, you can only use eight colors, and you might mix them a bit to get twelve or sixteen colors. It turned out to be an immense effort to make the translation from hundreds of colour hues to eight or twelve without losing the “photo” effect with all its depth. But we managed, and the beauty of the scale we chose was that the images are abstract when you’re near and more-and-more realistic as you move away.

Rail: Why plants? A lot of the work has imagery of something recognizable, wood grain or grass. I’m curious about image making.

Blaisse: I think it’s about contrast. You introduce something that is unexpected, or that gives people a kind of recognition that transcends cultures—a form of familiarity and consolation. This is the beauty of working with living things that are essential to all people globally: landscape and textiles.

Rail: When I think of Inside Outside and blur my vision, I think of it as a very collaborative practice. But when I look at any project, it is authored. It has a strength of character and an arbitrariness that only a group of very few people could come up with. There’s decision-making that makes the work technically clear and precise. How do you think about collaboration?

Blaisse: Collaboration is one of our biggest inspirations, because it’s wonderful to have a vision of what you would like to achieve, and then find the right people to work with to achieve it or something better. Our team here at Inside Outside is made up of architects, interior architects, designers, fashion designers, and landscape architects. Collaborating with architects, engineers, builders, gardeners, biologists, ecologists, lighting specialists, and craftspeople with each their own specialism is really so much fun for both sides. We all have a different background, which we use to discuss what something should become. The beginning is always really difficult. I always have a certain instinct and sometimes, someone else has that instinct too. There are lots of strong characters in collaborators and also in clients and maintenance teams. We are diplomats, we are in-between everything, and we have to communicate with everyone. We are working with a pile of impossibilities. Everyone wants it to be easy, cheap, flexible, cleanable, permanent, maintenance-free.

Rail: Maintenance is so central across all of your different practices. Landscape is the ultimate maintenance. Yet your work is actually constantly a threat to maintenance, since you can so easily imagine it disappearing, sooner than a building. Like this book, which spans 896 pages—how are you considering the preservation of your own work?

Blaisse: The Stedelijk has a piece of our garden voile, and a piece of the garden carpet in their collection. When Ann Goldstein was director, she commissioned us to make a tapestry for the entrance hall and the restaurant, as part of the new building by Benthem Crouwel Architects from Amsterdam. It’s about two hundred square meters, and it represents the new and the old building. There’s a large flower weaving its way through it that represents the former garden there. It’s now in their textile collection too, and we’re very happy about this, because now it’s protected, and that’s a great gift. A year and a half ago, they decided to take it down to make a new restaurant. We thought that was weird. That’s like an amputation. Anyway, there was no choice, the piece is theirs—the museum owns it and they do need a better restaurant.

I’m almost seventy now, and of course I’m thinking of what happens when Inside Outside falls apart, or for how long my partners will continue this adventure. You’re right, it would be good to start looking for parties who might be interested to take care of things.

Rail: They’re redoing the Toledo Museum of Art. You should look into what’s happening because they have a curtain too. That was a very amazing curtain, which I’ve never seen.

Blaisse: I haven’t seen it either, since it wasn’t ours in the end. We did design it, but we didn’t make it. We designed the whole track system, we made the final recipe for the curtains because they had to answer to a lot of technical requirements. Then, we were told by the newly appointed director that since we weren’t American, we couldn’t be working on a cultural building in America. That was a considerable shock.

Rail: That’s very strange. It would be great if some applied arts museum would be willing to kind of go acquire all the Petra Blaisse Inside Outside curtains. My sense, and also my hope, is that more and more practices are starting to look like your practice, and less and less are starting to look like traditional architecture, which I think is a very good thing. The world certainly needs both. But there’s a kind of disciplinary crutch of the business of architecture. I think people are taking more cues from your practice. When I look at the books and hear you talk, it looks better, it looks more exciting.

Blaisse: It’s nice because it’s a contradiction to something else, or it pays attention to something else. If everyone works like this, then yes, we are going to make architecture. The tension and the challenge, that’s where the energy comes from.

Rail: I can’t believe how much work you’ve done.

Blaisse: Unbelievable, right? And we’re still standing!