SCHIEDAM, The Netherlands — Some years ago, Daan Roosegaarde, the Dutch design-wunderkind, was facing what might sound like a pretty unusual problem: beautify the wind turbines that dot the Netherlands‘ landscape. In a country that values its rural aesthetics, the idea was to do something interesting with the many gray-white, ubiquitous, ungainly industrial windmills.
Roosegaarde and his lieutenants went to work playing around in his large design lab. While two colleagues whirled their outstretched arms to simulate the hundred-foot-long blades, Roosegaarde used a dozen laser pointers and some tape to sketch out his ideas. Within an afternoon, he came up with “Windlicht,” an idea that soon would light up the Dutch night sky.
Using spinning lasers, computers and laser targets attached to the blades of adjoining wind generators, the team designed a temporary laser show whose intricate designs change with wind speed and direction.
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That was a normal day at the lab for Roosegaarde, who has designed jewelry made of smog, clothing that responds to biometric output, phosphorescent bike paths and highways capable of displaying digital information on its surface. A chic mixture between a modern artist and old-fashioned inventor, Roosegaarde has become a fixture on the Dutch design scene. He’s come to personify the Dutch can-do, high-end design that ultimately benefits society as a whole, not just individual collectors or consumers.
“I’m a hippie with a business plan,” Roosegaarde likes to say.
What sets Roosegaarde apart from many dreamers is that he oversees a team of more than 20 full-time collaborators and that his ideas — no matter how lofty — tend to be realized.
“We are thinking about space waste next,” he says sitting in the library of his studio.
Roosegaarde’s status as national icon at the young age of 37 is remarkable. Having started his studio in 2007, Roosegaarde won his first major design award — the prestigious Dutch Design Award –in 2009 for an installation called “Flow 5.0,” a wall that consists of hundreds of computer cooling fans that respond to passersby. The myriad of interventions he and his collaborators have created since then — many focused on community space and interaction — have only increased in size, complexity and daring.
Back here on Earth, Roosegaarde’s team recently opened the first smog-free park in Beijing, after spending several years developing, building and demonstrating extraction towers capable of vacuuming the smog out of city air.
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His next big project is “Icoon Afsluitdijk,” an installation on the 20-mile Afsluitdijk, a dam built in the 1930s that helps separate the North Sea from the inland sea, Ijsselmeer. Both because of dam’s unofficial status as a national monument and the 13-million-euro ($14.4-million) price tag of the project, Roosegaarde’s work there will stand as a confirmation of his status as a national icon.
“Dikes in the Netherlands are as holy as cows in India,” says Roosegaarde.
His proposal for the dam centers on a vast array of energy-neutral lighting that will both replace the traditional street lighting — the dam, about 300 feet wide, is the site of a major causeway connecting the coastal region to the country’s interior — and provide a futuristic experience for visitors. The 80-year-old pumping houses, which are currently being restored, will be painted with an energy-neutral glowing substance that reacts to passing headlights. When the project is completed sometime in 2018, energy generating kites will fly overhead, while bio-phosphorescing water will react to visitors in an exhibit inside one of the pumping stations.
Roosegaarde “… is a creative thinker and maker of social designs which explore the relation between people, technology and space,” says Mirjam Stoffer , a spokesperson for the Rijkswaterstaat in Midden-Nederland, the regional water authority that is overseeing the project.
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The Dutch government, the water authorities and the surrounding municipalities envision an international tourist destination that helps explore humans’ relationship with water. In an era of rising sea levels and land loss, the renewed dam, together with Roosegaarde’s artistic vision, is hoped to serve as global best-practice example of engineering, history and design.
Roosegaarde has previously explored Dutch reliance — and mastery — of technology to keep the country dry. Last year he first exhibited “Waterlicht” (see the top image) using computers, light-emitting diodes and specialized lenses to illuminate where the natural flood water level above Amsterdam’s famous Museumplein might be.
“Without technology, without creative thinking, we would all drown,” he says, noting that his team’s enhancement of physical space is only natural to the Dutch.
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One need not have to wander far from Roosegaarde’s studio here in the industrial part of Rotterdam to see to what extent the Dutch value good (and expensive) urban design. Rotterdam, the site of Europe’s largest harbor, was almost destroyed by German bombs during the war. The new city has become a mecca for designers, architects and city planners. And while its cantilever buildings, asymmetrical single-pylon cable bridge and slick modern central station have become a symbol of modernity among the Dutch, the rest of the country, too, spends an impressive amount of public funds on infrastructure design.
In 2015, Roosegaarde moved his studio to a former 11,000 square-foot space. Built in an abandoned glass factory in an area that has become a hub for designers, makers and startups, Roosegaarde christened the elegant space the Dream Factory.
Were it not for his impressive oeuvre before the actual change of locale, the move might be seen — with an inauguration that featured Rotterdam’s mayor and other luminaries — as the step into the design big leagues. This year Roosegaarde unveiled a 370-feet-long artwork commissioned by Schiphol Airport, the nation’s gateway to the world. The installation, BEYOND, uses the kind of passive hologram technology found on credit cards to afford weary traveler s an “augmented reality” trip into the clouds.
And though Roosegaarde has made a career designing beautiful things, he sees a bigger role for himself. Speaking of climate change, rising sea levels and the world his generation is inheriting, he says:
“The world is changing. All we can do is think of new proposals — the role of art is to show what the new world can look like.”
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Dutch Innovator Daan Roosegaarde Has Designs for a Better Society originally appeared on usnews.com
