Intervention by Inside Outside

Guest curator Petra Blaisse offers visitors a totally new experience of Sonneveld House with one ingenious intervention. Interior designer and landscape architect Blaisse explores the limits of architecture with her office Inside Outside by enhancing or temporarily transforming the unique qualities of buildings and their outdoor spaces. Blaisse is renowned for the soft yet compelling way she separates or envelops space with monumental curtains.

The first floor of Sonneveld House consists of a sequence of open spaces that feature a wonderful collection of chrome furniture and lamps by furniture producer Gispen. Generous expanses of fenestration set in elegant steel frames ensure an almost seamless connection with the surrounding garden. When daylight floods the interior, the room and furniture appear almost to float.

With this intervention Inside Outside responds to the three key principles of Dutch Functionalism: light, air and space. The simple yet efficient insertion distorts the perspective of visitors, exposing ‘the other side’ of Sonneveld House and enhancing the relation between inside and outside.