Thursday, 23 February 2006 | Elif Sungur
Plan the Impossible
The World of Architect Hendrik Wijdeveld
He has often been compared to visionaries like Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. He designed a 20-kilometer deep shaft to the center of the Earth, devised a plan for the reforestation of the Netherlands and proposed a new neighborhood around a people's theater in the Vondelpark - these are just a few of the ideas of Hendrik Wijdeveld (1885-1987), the architect with the most fertile imagination in Dutch architectural history. To Wijdeveld, the world was a total theater where he could stage his dreams. He posited visual spectacle against the imageless, "scientific" urban schemes of Modernism. The Netherlands Architecture Institute is therefore proud to present "Plan the Impossible: The World of Architect Hendrik Wijdeveld (1885-1987)", an exhibition about the oeuvre of an architect who lived to be over a hundred years old.
Spectacular showmanship in the Netherlands Architecture Institute until May 21 2006.
Exhibition
The NAI has designed the Hendrik Wijdeveld exhibition as a multimedia spectacle with drawings, light, film and sound. The darkened gallery contains a large luminous ring surrounded by over a hundred drawings bathed in dramatic light. Inside the ring, a projected animation depicts a journey through the imagination of Wijdeveld.
Relevant Today
Wijdeveld's theatrical approach to urban design is as relevant today as ever. The Western city is losing its identity through the blurring of the boundary between town and country. New design methods are being developed to inject some order into the resulting chaos. With his concept of the "cityless city", Wijdeveld sought a new form for the urban environment that can still inspire us in this today.
Theater
Traveling around the main cities of Europe in the early years of the twentieth century, Wijdeveld sensed even then the threatening explosion of the modern metropolis. Today's mass media and individual mobility have robbed the city of its physical coherence and replaced it by a complex tangle of impressions. Wijdeveld recentralized the human being, taking the perceptive psychology of the theater as his starting point. The outcome was a new cultural ideal: life and art were fused into a "total work of art." The distinction between actors and audience would vanish. In 1918, Wijdeveld brought these ideas together in his People's Theater Project - a new neighborhood in the middle of Amsterdam's biggest city park (Vondelpark) with a gigantic theater as its crowning moment.
The Cityless City
Wijdeveld's regarded the city as an outmoded phenomenon. He sought a more organic relationship between buildings and the natural environment. He hoped to create order by thinking from the landscape instead of from an urban situation. Buildings would be liberated from the tight constraints of streets and squares and could be used to create cohesion with the landscape in continually changing situations. He conceived a plan to hem in the existing city with a ring of towers. The towers would not only act as dramatic landmarks but would set a resolute boundary to urban growth. He took advantage of his experience in theater design to stage a new landscape and evoke collective experiences. He was in this respect many years ahead of today's "experience economy," in which a total directorial vision is so sorely lacking.
Publication
The book published to accompany the exhibition will explore the background to Wijdeveld's theatrical urbanism. Ten important projects will be illustrated and discussed in a picture essay, which reproduces 75 images from the Wijdeveld archives.
For more information, please visit http://www.nai.nl
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