social 01

What is your favourite colour? What color does your products identify with the most?
We have no favourite colour. Every product or space has it’s own quality and therefore we look for that particular solution at the time.

Light, material, colour: how do the three elements dialogue in yours projects?
We have a preference for pure materials. Clarity and honesty are very important in our work. Also, we mostly do not use more then two or three different colours or materials in one project. We do not reject any material or colour. But the fake materials are never used unless we want to make some sort of statement with it. Our work is for human beings most of the time and we try to keep this in mind when we design. So what suites the senses? What lifts the spirit? What triggers creativity? It can be anything...but often clarity, space and light are the first choice.

How much does the colour count for the success of yours projects?
We only use colour if it fits the project, the client and the space itself. We believe that every situation is different and therefore asks for particular solutions, not standard but on the contrary personal and specific. Partitioning of space is often determined by seeking for the best possible solution to the space and it’s possibilities. Searching for this solution, we work in a very intuitive, abstract way. Therefore we try to design as much as possible in all our interior projects, so this means also the furniture and smaller objects. Furniture actually takes a special place since we like to solve much of our solutions in them. This leads to often very practical, but also new situations. For us this is also the innovative aspect of our design work.

What role does colour play when designing a project, and in particular, for your SOCIAL 01 project?
In the nomination rapport of The Great Indoors Award, we where praised for our way of using colour: jury rapport The Great Indoors Award 2009/interior design firm of the year: “The fact that this firm has been nominated twice before, in the categories Concentrate & Collaborate and Serve & Facilitate, illustrates the convincing power of the projects of i29 Interior Architects. In the jury’s eyes, this firm shows how capable it is of linking architectonic components with intensive studies of surfaces that gain maximum impact through the use of a colour or typography. This firm represents a method in which architecture and interior architecture come together in a model combination”. We do not design things as most do, we do not style what is there. What we truly try to do is to literally design the space; the stuff that is not physically there. And we can only do this by designing the physical material. But it is a completely different approach and it obviously leads to surprising results. One more thing I can say about it is that we try to look at it as a composition as in music. As in music the silence is essential to the music itself. It is the same way with space. We work with structures and rhythms in an elementary and almost abstract way, not with fasion and style. In the project Combiwerk, colour was used to make a visible arrangement of space. The building itself is a completely closed, grey monolithic shape.
The same grey can also be found in the walls, floors and ceilings of the interior. In contrast with that, we placed colorful islands throughout the whole building. In an almost fairytale-like way, the building contains secret gardens full of colour and vitality, which could be read as a reference to the contrast of external appearances and inner richness. It is our belief that every person is unique and special and this counts maybe even more in the less obvious cases, There are many nuances and varieties in defining who or what you are, nobody can be characterized by just one aspect of there being.
This theme we translated in the interior in an abstract way by using colour in many different tones and also by the wide variety of chairs.