The Netherlands is a place where it's possible "to practically breathe fresh design," says Paola Antonelli, curator of architecture and design at New York's Museum of Modern Art, which has collected works by such Dutch stars as Marcel Wanders. "Design is embedded in everyday life. The stamps, the postal logo: it's all breathtakingly lovely." And since the '90s, the country has generated some of the globe's most interesting designers, many of them graduates of the Design Academy Eindhoven. Says Antonelli, "Dutch designers — graphic, furniture, architecture and fashion — have been revolutionary and have sparked major changes in the world of design."
To understand Dutch design, it helps to understand a thing or two about the Dutch. Stroll the cobbled streets along the canals and let your eyes wander over the houses. In some ways they are reflections of the people who live inside: they have modest façades but unexpected depth. They are extremely open; street-level windows are almost never curtained. And inside they're usually neat and modern.
The Dutch are known for their liberal outlook and their quirkiness, but there's something pragmatic about them too, like their inclination, whether rich or poor, in fair weather or foul, to get around the narrow streets of their small city on clunky old bikes. This contradiction is at the heart of Dutch design.
There's an Alice-in-Wonderland, upside-down aesthetic at play: ugly is made beautiful (as in Joris Laarman's radiator, which looks like a curlicued wall sculpture), and small becomes giant-sized (Wanders's six-foot-tall lamp shades). But however whimsical the objects may seem, they also tend to be functional. Take Hella Jongerius's Soft Vase, which is both unbreakable and fun to touch. As Antonelli points out, the Dutch have always had to depend on cutting-edge engineering and technology just to stay above water, so "technical knowledge is at the base of their existence."
Respectful of the long history of Dutch craftsmanship, designers often fuse the traditional with the contemporary, as in the collaborations of innovators Jurgen Bey, Jongerius, Wanders and Studio Job with Royal Tichelaar Makkum, maker of fine porcelain for four centuries. Says thirteenth-generation director Jan Tichelaar, "By working with Dutch designers, we have rid ourselves of the stigma of being dull" — a claim no one can make about Studio Job's set of Tichelaar porcelain plates, with their images of skeletons and Venetian masks, which were the talk of the Milan Furniture Fair, in April.
Also incorporating traditional craftsmanship into his work is Alexander van Slobbe, who in the 1980s was the first Dutch fashion designer to be sold at Barneys New York and Joseph. Even his ready-to-wear has an artisanal quality. Gold lace embellishes a leather jacket in a recent collection. At the moment Van Slobbe's studio is in the historic center, but once the Westergasfabriek is complete, he'll move there. Like the old gasworks, Amsterdam has entered a bright new phase. "Thirty years ago, Amsterdam was a dirty city," Van Slobbe says simply, "but now it's clean." Some might even say golden.
