Vacant NL & Pretty Vacant

RIETVELD ARCHITECTURE-ART-AFFORDANCES

Based in Amsterdam, Rietveld Art-Architecture-Affordances creates work at the intersection of art, architecture, and science. Philosopher Erik Rietveld, architect Ronald Rietveld, and architect Arna Mackic form RAAAF's core design team. RAAAF aims to make "real-life thinking models" that open up new perspectives and possibilities for urban and philosophical problems.

In 2010, RAAAF designed the Dutch submission to the Venice Biennale. They were asked to make a statement about the potential of landscape architecture to help resolve the complex challenges that our society faces today. The result was Vacant NL, a model city of blue foam representing the thousands of Dutch state-owned buildings — from ex-industrial sites to disused municipal offices to abandoned churches — that currently sit empty.

In 2013, RAAAF created Pretty Vacant, an installation for the Centraal Museum Utrecht. Whereas Vacant NL foregrounded empty spaces by rendering them positively in the form of a model, Pretty Vacant renders these spaces negatively as the voids of a window. The resulting window sheds new light, both literally and figuratively, on the otherwise medieval architecture of the museum, alerting viewers to a future of possibility lying latent in the many unused urban spaces within the Netherlands.

To learn more about Rietveld Art-Architecture-Affordances, click here.