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IJburg’s Blauwe Huis is a ‘housing corporation for the mind’.

by Marinus de Ruiter

Blok 35 is still surrounded by mud and scattered bricks. From the outside, the apartment complex on the west side of the new residential district of IJburg looks nondescript -until you pass the entrance to the inner courtyard. There, the afternoon sunshine amplifies the bright cobalt blue of a villa standing inside the block.

'It's a bizarre object', says artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, standing beside the Blauwe Huis -as the villa, designed by architect Teun Koolhaas (a nephew of Rem Koolhaas), is called. 'When I first saw the plans for this area, the villa immediately caught my eye and it raised questions. Who would want to buy this and live there?’

With four storeys, a roof garden and a back yard, the Blauwe Huis has plenty of space, but it offers little privacy. Some of the surrounding apartments are less than 10 metres away, and large glass panes on all sides give a floor-to-ceiling overview of its interior. 'It's like a giant peep show', Van Heeswijk says. But there’s nothing to see inside –yet.

The Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst commissioned the Rotterdam based artist to develop a work for the apartment block. She decided her project would be to prevent the sale of her 'found object', the Blauwe Huis. Her aim is to make it into a home for the arts for the next four years, after which time it will be put on the market, as originally planned.

Guests working in all kinds of disciplines will be invited to stay and work in the Blauwe Huis: artists, architects, writers, scientists, perhaps even politicians and lawyers. 'It’s a housing corporation for the mind', says Van Heeswijk. 'We invite people to become members of the corporation, which gives them the right to stay in the house for six months.'The French artist Hervé Paraponaris, who makes site-specific works for public spaces, and Van Heeswijk herself will be the first inhabitants. Participating in the Blauwe Huis can take various forms. With a large scale in mind, artist Filia den Hollander has proposed developing an alternative European constitution. On a more intimate level, artist Rudy Luijters has been asked to design the villa’s 212-square-metre garden.

The Blauwe Huis project fits into the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst’s plans for other IJburg art projects. ‘A new estate like this leads to an overkill of architecture and design’, says Tanja Karremans, a former adviser to the AFK. ‘But there is not much yet that contributes to public life. We’ve invited artists to do just that.’

For inspiration, Van Heeswijk has turned to other famous coloured houses in art history, like Van Gogh's Yellow House in Arles and Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico. 'These were places in which the inhabitants created an image of the world and exchanged ideas’, she explains. A severely planned environment such as IJburg needs places like this, places for nonconformity. They contribute to life'.

The future guests must have one interest in common, Van Heeswijk says. 'We’ll invite people who are investigating new and innovative forms of community building. With the Blauwe Huis, we’re trying to create a platform for them to work, present their ideas, meet each other and start a discussion'.

By becoming part of her own platform, Van Heeswijk is deliberately renouncing the role of curator or director. 'Basically, this is a project without a curator’, she says. ‘It’s set up as a self-organising, self-growing mechanism. I do not support the idea of attaching it to one person, which is something that always seems to happen in art.'

Van Heeswijk stresses the fact that this isn't an artist-in-residence programme, and the Blauwe Huis is not set to become a gallery. 'I hate the word’, she says, ‘but this project can be considered a gesamtkunstwerk -an artwork without a central figure. I guess I'm an old-fashioned idealist. I work with the idea that it is possible to develop new ways of cooperating'.

Since the 1990s, Van Heeswijk has developed several projects on the themes of communication and cooperation. At the moment, she’s rounding off the Stedelijk Lab project in Slotervaart, for which local primary and secondary school students were asked to design a neighbourhood park, using specially designed software and assisted by architecture and planning experts. The park is slated to open in 2007.

Before that, she and inhabitants of the soon-to-be-demolished Crooswijk district in Rotterdam participated in a project called Dwaallicht in which they investigated and preserved the area’s cultural identity through media that included a website and a newspaper.

'The principle of my work is to develop models for researching new ways in which people or groups in society can relate to each other', says Van Heeswijk. 'I would like the Blauwe Huis to function as a public think tank, with the goal of finding new stories, new thoughts. Many people in contemporary society, especially in new areas like (IJburg), are unable to get a grip on their surroundings. I see art and imagination as tools for doing just that, for being of service to society.'

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