NOTE

Theatre Zeebelt presents Zefir7: a design café for The Hague. It was founded in 1998 as a monthly design lecture series. The basic idea was "small and frequent". The organisation wants to offer interesting young designers a platform to present their works and ideas. And established designers or larger studios a platform to present their "B-sides" and "secret tracks". The evenings are held on the second Thursday of each month. Each evening is reviewed by writers independent of the Programming Committee. I was one of the regular writers during the period 2005-2010.

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Jurgen Bey

Review commissioned by Zefir7 | November 2006


Jurgen Bey is the Lewis Carrol of three-dimensional design. When you listen to him, you tumble into a rabbit hole and land in world where everything you learnt about etiquette and identity is turned upside down. You are deprogrammed. It is not for nothing that he calls his thought processes ‘thinking from the back’.



Bey tells us about his journey to India, where he could enjoy to his heart’s content the organic way in which people, through their daily lives, influence their environment. The traffic flow, which always keeps going in a natural way, without the interference of traffic lights and signs. The clay pits, where the labourers with just a mould magically transform the entire landscape into an Easter island of bricks. Newly built offices on stilts are used as roofs for the tents of the poorest of the poor. Kite rope is knit in the streets, not tucked away in a factory hall. This seeming simplicity, the inventiveness and the openness are considered primitive by Western eyes. But what designer does not dream of transforming by magic an entire landscape?
 
Column of the worldHis plans for ‘Meerstad’ (Laketown), an enlargement area for 10,000 homes east of Groningen city, show to what lengths Bey is going in applying his vision of communities. He focuses on amateur clubs. The card-games club gets its home base in the boardroom of a mud processing machine. When machine is relocated, the club relocates with it. The brass band gets the drained skating-rink to parade in, and in winter time they provide the music for the skaters.

To end with, Bey shows his sources of inspiration from the world of art. A huge bronze pedestal stands upside down in the grass. All those present turn their heads to the left. “ The pedestal of the world” we read. The die is cast. It just depends on how you look at it. A best-of-design slideshow is absent to night -- so much the better for the audience, since what Jurgen Bey has given us is ever so much more inspiring.

Anne Miltenburg