Sonneveld Huis & Het Nieuwe Instituut

Grant Awarded by PZI & MIARD

 

 

The Sonneveld House in Rotterdam is one of the supreme achievements of Nieuwe Bouwen, the Dutch branch of the International School of Modernism.

The architects Brinkman and Van der Vlugt built the house in 1933 for Albertus Sonneveld and his family. Their goal as designers was to create a Modern living environment where light, air and space became the main elements.

Today the restored Sonneveld House that was once a carefully designed home is now a place “standing still in time”; even though it looks like a domestic space, it is barely used as one. All of the rooms are yet to be used, but only by temporary visitors that follow a path as distant observers.

Moreover, as Modern architecture widely explored the relation between interior and exterior, I approached the Camera Obscura technique in order to stress this relation by visually merging both spaces into one.
When producing a Camera Obscura, the external space leaks into the interior, the window is no longer a peephole, but becomes a two-way portal between inside and outside; literally transforming the house into a camera that can document its own context. The intersection of the 1930’s preserved interiors against the 2014’s contemporary surroundings produces a juxtaposition of two parallel places that talk about different times.

This collection aims at overlapping diverse scenarios and producing multiple readings of this iconic modernist house to visualize time passing while altering the perception of space. 

 

Through this visual research, I once more try to unveil diverse scenarios that simultaneously exist by deeply studying and documenting the same interior space. Based on the experiments and reflections developed in the first phase of "Interior Portraits: Nolenstraat" I continued my exploration through the different layers of information and atmospheres contained in the domestic interior, layers that are normally not visible to the eyes.

 

 

VISIT PROJECT'S BOOK

Interior Portraits Vol. II: Sonneveld House