Apr09
Published by misha in Arts, Cultural, Europe, Events, Netherlands, Photos, Urban Tourism

Het Veer is a school for children with learning and concentration difficulties. The school interior work was to convey and attract concentration, playfulness and movement. Their eight different white and red tube furniture pieces can be mixed and matched creating various formations. They play off the Buzz Wire science game that teaches about electric circuits and is based on concentration and hand coordination.

The school is located in Almere, a 25 kilometers east of Amsterdam and often referred to as the most modern city in Europe. Almost 1,500 students work in a sport-centric environment where they receive coaching for their specific sport and in academic topics. i29, also the creator of Het Veer was asked to envision the public spaces — including the main hall, staff room, library and computer/media room — for the new Bos & Partners architects-designed building with its gray brick, glass walls and unusual floor plans. They featured big images of the school’s famous sports hero alumni and then custom-created multi-functional tables, benches and signage, plus a color scheme for the common areas.

Het Veer is very beautiful school and one of the easiest ways to make a boring space more vibrant is to use color.

Mar17
Published by misha in Arts, Cultural, North America, Photos, United States of America, Urban Tourism

Over the last years in New York, the Robin Hood Foundation and city’s schools administration have constructed art libraries in 62 schools. Some of the libraries and those recently created at three schools in the Bronx have also appear with the addition of art works by well-known artists. In the picture, left, an art work at P.S. 47 by the illustrator Maira Kalman.

“I go to museums all over the world, and I love natural-history displays, and I wanted something that felt like that,†said Ms. Kalman

Another view of the installation, which Ms. Kalman said was intended to conjure the kind of eccentric personal museums that amateur scientists and collectors once built as a means of cataloging the world.

Some of the objects in the installation include a lump of unformed glass, a giant 1,000-watt light bulb and a fake coconut cake with a cherry on top. The library at P.S. 47 was designed by the architect Richard H. Lewis.

This library is called P.S. 96, and the design firm Pentagram helped find artists willing to donate time and resources to create outsize pieces that ring the rooms.

At P.S. 69, Christoph Niemann has designed a mural that uses images of books serving as almost everything — as Abraham Lincoln’s beard and Mona Lisa’s smile, as a car hood, an eagle’s wings and a dinosaur’s teeth — all organized with Dewey Decimal System numbers in painted bubbles.