Petra Blaisse's interiors and landscapes provide the feminine ballast to contrast Rem Koolhaas's stark buildings
Metropolis
April 2001
It is the end of summer and Petra Blaisse is barefoot in her mother's garden. Actually, she is standing amid a matrix of photographic carpet tiles she designed using images of her family's small yard in Amsterdam. Blaisse, the Dutch designer of interiors and landscapes known for her striking collaborations with Rem Koolhaas, has a talent for turning nature into culture and culture into nature. She is, in a sense, architecture's experimental Earth Mother, convincing builders of glass, cement and steel monuments to pay attention to -- of all things -- curtains and gardens. The fairway-like carpet transforms Manhattan's Storefront for Architecture (where Blaisse is having her first solo show last September) into a spirited greenhouse -- or to be more exact, a hothouse of architectural experimentation. "We are all gardeners," Blaisse says of her family. "So it springs from being a gardener in the first place and then creating worlds."
"She really thinks of herself as a gardener," says Terrence Riley from his office at the Museum of Modern Art where he is chief curator of architecture and design. "But for Petra," Riley explains, "a garden isn't a place where you grow things. Just like a curtain isn't to keep the sun out. Both are enormously emotive." Blaisse is reinvigorating what is traditionally considered women's domains -- curtains and gardens -- by infusing them with unexpected materials and a poet's sense of metaphor and sensuality. She unabashedly calls the work "a softening of the edges, an inviting in, a creating of shelter."
In Blaisse's world, interiors and exteriors more than playfully coexist- they blur and clash, then recombine to form something new. "They are totally different professions, yet they are completely connected through the role they have," Blaisse says. "Open the window and the garden comes in, the curtain comes out."
The Storefront gallery is shaped something like a sliver of pie. Portions of the walls pivot open out to the street, limiting the already narrow display area. It's not an easy space for an artist to work with, so Blaisse has turned it inside out. Sheets of mirrored Mylar adorn the walls inviting sunlight inside; pillows sprouting grass like giant Chia Pets lie on the sidewalk outside. Samples of her stage curtain for theaters and concert halls hang in the threshold. Stereo speakers fill the room with the rhythmic sounds of curtain rails opening and closing-an acoustical element that evokes the sea. And obscuring the entire southwest facade from rooftop to sidewalk is a red-and-orange drape of Christo proportions sewn from scaffolding nets.
The Storefront show centers almost exclusively on curtains. For the most part, they have long, elegant lines and whimsical flourishes. So does their creator: Blaisse is a tall woman with high cheekbones, wide-set hazel eyes, and a squarish jaw. She is pretty, naturally so, and an inventive dresser, pairing long, velvet skirts with sneakers or loudly patterned polyester shirts with delicate earrings. She is opinionated and shy, and speaks a nuanced English that is spare and often poetic. During the time I spent watching her install the show at Storefront, she compared a building to a peeled apple, fabric to icing, and curtains to evening gowns. Though she may only acknowledge these similes with a gentle smile, her subversiveness is not lost on anyone. In the architect's arena beauty is often dismissed as mere adornment, but Blaisse doesn't shy away from connotations of femininity -- she emphasizes them. Power and domesticity are two words that are seldom paired, yet they are often used to describe her work.
Although Blaisse has run her own studio called Inside/Outside, in Amsterdam, since 1991 and maintains a diverse and burgeoning clientele -- including architects Michael Maltzen, Richard Gluckman, Tim Ronalds, and the Museum of Modern Art -- she is best known as a longtime collaborator of Koolhaas and his Office of Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.). She has created opulent gardens and immense curtains (soft walls, really, that move and breathe) for O.M.A.'s high profile private residences, such as the Villa Floirac in Bordeaux, and the Villa dall'Ava, in Paris, and for many of their cultural halls throughout Europe. She has also been in a relationship with Koolhaas for 16 years (despite his marriage to Madelon Vriesendorp), further complicating the inside outside thing.
Their relationship also complicates writing about Blaisse. My initial aim of extricating her from the shadow of Koolhaas's celebrity quickly faded. It would have involved the impossible task of deciphering where professional passion ends and personal passion begins. So I observed and listened, and the conversation always gravitated to Koolhaas, whether I was talking to curators and critics or to Blaisse's 71-year-old mother, Riny, a painter. "He's a genius-and a genius is a genius," she wryly told me, quickly adding, "They are very good for each other because they give each other enormous inspiration. It's not one-way traffic!" Moreover, Blaisse herself constantly evoked him, often referring to him as "the architect" (as if that were going to fool anyone). Whatever the case, shared passion yields strong work. It seems to be the key component to Blaisse's development as an artist. To ignore that would be to dismiss a very powerful, very productive force.
Though Dutch by nationality, Blaisse was born in London in 1955 and spent most of her childhood living in Lisbon, Paris, Vienna, and Stockholm. Her father worked for the Lever Brothers Corporation and the family moved periodically, enrolling her in French schools. After studying art, she worked at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam for eight years, rising from assistant in the Applied Arts department to exhibition designer.
It was there that she first collaborated with Koolhaas. She did not know it then, but when she installed O.M.A's first museum show, her life was about to take a twist. O.M.A. soon hired her to design all of their exhibits, a venture that would take her around the world. Though it was an uncharted and financially tenuous time, there is tangible excitement in Blaisse's voice when she recounts those early years. "We were always presented as a package to the museums," she says. "We were a team." Prior to 1984 all of the firm's buildings were on paper only; Koolhaas's reputation as iconoclast was based largely on his book Delirious New York. But O.M.A. was finally starting to build, and it was an exciting, expansive arena for a designer to find herself in.
Blaisse's had her debut as curtain designer in 1987, when O.M.A. landed a commission to build the Netherlands Dance Theater, in The Hague. Though Blaisse was brought in to consult on the building's interior -- its use of space, light and color -- something more specific sprang to mind. "You should make it a black, colorless box with one luxurious element," she told them, "and that should be the curtain." Her original plans called for a metal curtain, but it would have been too heavy to construct. The curtain would have to be (gasp!) velvet. "The architects, being modern architects, said it seemed old-fashioned and stuffy," Blaisse says. "So my search was to take that old-fashioned whatever -- it's always red -- and turn it into something unexpected." Working with a chemist, she developed a glue that could be silk-screened onto a tough woolen velvet and then pressed with a gold foil. The result is a vertical expanse of gold disks that when spotlit radiates like the sun. Herbert Muschamp of The New York Times recently called the curtain "the logo for the building."
The project launched Blaisse's career as an artist. For the curtain wasn't just a curtain for Blaisse and Koolhaas, but "an evolution we went through together," she says, explaining that from then on Koolhaas began "taking the curtain seriously as an architectural element." According to Blaisse, he's slowly coming around to gardens, too.
At the party after the Storefront show preview Blaisse encouraged me to ask Koolhaas about her work, something she said he had never been asked to do. She was curious. In a quiet stairwell, I asked Koolhaas about the exhibit and what his buildings would be like without Blaisse's contributions. "What is interesting about the show is that an entity that is always treated like an afterthought or as a decoration or as a form of weakness can be almost overpowering in its effect," he told me. He paused to collect his thoughts and then said definitively, "I can make the buildings harsher -- more pure -- because there is this counterpart."
I shared Koolhaas's remarks with Balisse a few days later on a sunny Sunday morning in Gramercy Park, a private garden that she had access to as a guest at a nearby hotel. She responded in kind: "To work with someone who will share power -- or who will confront his work with another force -- is creative or in a sense daring." She pointed to the sunlit shrubs around her and continued, "Rem looks at the whole, the big lines, but if you are a gardener you look at the little effects. If you put it together, it adds up to a bigger whole." And it is this bigger whole, this "third part," as Riley puts it, which is often tenuous, but, in the case of Koolhaas and Blaisse, resonates powerfully.
At first glance, Blaisse's sensuous approach may seem at odds with the hard-edged buildings her work is often associated with. For the Grand Pallais in Lille, a vast conference hall and an important O.M.A. commission, Blaisse designed three stage curtains, one studded with grommets arranged as constellations in the night sky. "Rem's and mine are hidden in there. Those are little jokes in there. It's kind of a starry sky," she says. When lit from behind in the dark theater, the cosmos appear and the hall evokes a planetarium. One wall, designed to absorb sound, is made from oversize pillows upholstered in faux blue leather with buttons "the size of dessert plates" as she puts it.
Each of her projects uses materials inventively, whether it's acoustic curtain-walls for the Mick Jagger Centre, in London, or a spiral-pattern carpet made of crushed sea shells for a prison yard near Utrecht. "The way she uses materials is not normal," her mother says, referring to a gossamer black curtain Blaisse studded with floor-polishing wheels.
Because Blaisse is involved with a project from its inception, rather than providing accessories to the finished product, there is ample room for experimentation. These ventures are often subtle studies in surfaces and boundaries. The tracks for her "Sound Curtain," for the Rotterdam Kunsthal, were poured into the cement ceiling, physically becoming part of the architecture. Small speakers are incorporated into the reversible fabric, which is silver when wrapped around a cement column and black when it unfurls along the curved tracks to define a round stage. For an upcoming project at an underground parking garage in Almere, Holland, Blaisse will plant a "swamp garden."
Her plans for landscaping the new Seattle Library (a current O.M.A. project) were recently approved. A "library" of indigenous trees and plants will line the walkways that connect the sidewalk to the building. "What O.M.A. has done -- Rem specifically with Petra -- is allow her to inhabit this space and install another project within it," Riley explains. "Petra has turned these domestic arts into public events in a spectacular way."
Too often close collaborations between architects and designers fail because the parties involved do not share the same vision-much less the same breakfast table. A tacit and fine-tuned sense of trust does not have time to flourish. There are exceptions, however, and the most uncanny comparison to the Koolhaas-Blaisse team is the collaboration between Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich.
Reich was a formidable woman -- a pioneering modernist and a talented designer of clothing, exhibits, furniture, and interiors. An influential player in the Deutsche Werkbund throughout the 1920s and 1930s, she became Mies's artistic partner in much the same capacity as Blaisse is to Koolhaas-minus the gardens. "Rem is totally obsessed with Mies, and this Petra thing is no accident," suggests Beatriz Colomina, associate professor of architecture at Princeton University.
Like Blaisse, who designed O.M.A.'s first museum exhibit, Reich's first project for Mies was an exhibit for an architecture show. From there the relationship evolved into interiors; Reich designed curtains, furniture, and displays for many of the architect's landmark buildings and expo halls. "She used silk when he used only marble and glass and metal," says Blaisse. "My interest is in the contradiction." The relationship between Mies and Reich was romantic and extramarital. But more significantly, Mies saw Reich as a partner worthy of collaborating with and provided her an arena in which to experiment and come into her own. Reich's presence affected the outcome of Mies's buildings; for when Mies emigrated to the U.S. in 1937 his relationship with Reich faltered, and his buildings took on a colder tone. "What is missing in Mies's later work, after he emigrates, is this alter ego," says Riley.
"This kind of big boy architects, like Mies or Rem, give the secondary stuff to women, but they are really counting on it," says Colomina. "They know the real effect of the hard' work is dependent on the delicate membranes suspended within it."
Though Blaisse steadfastly maintains her own identity, she does not downplay her personal involvement with "the architect." "We have a life together. If you live with a man for 16 years, it's nice to be considered part of his life rather than a secret -- which it isn't," she told me as we sat on a sun-warmed bench in Gramercy Park. Wearing all black, save for a vibrant green scarf and metallic sneakers, she was considerably more relaxed and forthcoming than she had been during the week I observed her install her show. But she had allotted only a single hour to discuss her entire life's work with me. Her flight back to Amsterdam was set for this evening, and she had filled her day with meetings. Upon returning to her studio she would dig right into the Seattle Library project, present plans for a private garden in New York City, and finalize designs for the soon to be constructed Dutch Embassy in Berlin; the Casa Musica in Porto, Portugal; and the Lensvelt furniture headquarters in Brenda, Holland. She would also work on textile objects for Prada stores in New York and Los Angeles.
The hour shot by. We talked so much about her work that I had forgotten to ask her about Koolhaas. Fortunately, when she stood to leave, she glanced down at my clear plastic satchel of research materials. And there was Rem's larger-than-life face looking up at us from the cover of The New York Times Magazine where he had been profiled. "They wanted to interview me," Blaisse remarked. "But I'm glad I didn't [talk to them] because I want to be an individual on the outside and not be part of this myth-creating." Then she made her way to the iron-barred gates to leave.
As it happens, you need a key not only to enter but to exit Gramercy Park. A hotel employee had let us in, but now there was no one in sight to let us out. For a moment, the garden -- fussy and sculpted and sweet-smelling though it was -- was no longer a respite but something completely different. The joke was on Blaisse, and she held onto the iron bars, devising her next project: a garden with no barriers between inside and out.
© 2001 Melissa Milgrom
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