I created a new category: Inspirations. Motivation for that is to A) archive my knowledge sources B) make it public to share and C) hopefully create a kind of inspiration moodboard for my work and art practice. First of are 2 lectures of 2 of my main inspiration sources: Rem Koolhaas and Petra Blaisse. Both challenge the classical understanding of the term architecture (Rem) and Textiles (Petra).

I visited Rem Koolhaas Content exhibition in Berlin, a very rich creative fresh looking upon architecture show, showing as well works of the AMO lab, the research lab of OMA / Office for Metropolitan Architecture where Rem Koolhaas is a founding partner. Rem Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and in 2008 Time put him in their top 100 of The World’s Most Influential People.[1] (wikipedia). Listen to his lecture here: OMA*AMO; What Architecture Can Do?

My first contact with the work of Petra Blaisse happened to be at the Enmeshed Seminar I visited in 2010 at the KonstFack in Stockholm / Sweden. She is a Dutch designer and works in a multitude of creative areas, including textile, landscape and exhibition design. She founded Inside Outside. Unique in its genre, the firm combine expertise in various fields including landscape architecture, textile design and interior design. Wikipedia. Listen to her lecture here: Petra Blaisse.

Funnily there is a connection point of Petra Blaisse and Rem Koolhaas. Petra Blaisse worked in collaboration with Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. There has been another collaboration between architecture and textile in the past: the collaboration between Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. Looking up the spectre of those collaborations gives valuable insights of the use of textile in architecture, use and meaning of materials in architecture and shows the performative potential of the textile medium in space.