Geert Mul and Maurer United Architects Transform Bus Stop into a Beacon for the Media Era

EINDHOVEN.- On a yearly basis since 1990, the ‘Rietveld Bus Stop’ Foundation invites someone from the art world to develop a project for the Rietveld Bus Stop at the Stadhuisplein in Eindhoven. This year they invited Christiane Berndes, curator at the Van Abbemuseum. She worked with Baltan Laboratories, and together with Angela Plohman, director of Baltan, they invited artists Geert Mul and Maurer United Architects to present their vision on the significance of Rietveld and De Stijl today. They transformed the bus stop into a beacon for the media era. The project is installed for one year.

Mul and Maurer United were inspired by the map of Eindhoven made out of mosaic tiles located on the wall under the roof of the shelter. It is one of the first city maps in public space. The square tiles from which the map is constructed give the image a pixellated character that echoes the early imagery of the computer age. In this design, Rietveld strayed from the typical red, yellow and blue colours of De Stijl. With the colours he chose to use (red, green, blue), he inadvertently made a connection to the television and computer age.

In the column next to the shelter, Mul and Maurer placed images of universal worldviews and colour systems. They juxtaposed them with images of the practical counterparts of the colour systems in our daily lives: the screen, the television, the CD and the Pantone colour wheel. Furthermore, they replaced the original fluorescent lights in the column with LED lights in red, green and blue. Through the colour change of the LED lights, various layered images are made visible on the column.

Gerrit Rietveld’s Design
In 1962 the renowned Dutch architect, graphic designer and furniture designer Gerrit Rietveld designed an advertising column with a shelter for the City of Eindhoven. The design was only produced after Rietveld’s death in 1964, but for various reasons was never used for its originally envisioned purpose. As a result, as years went on, no one could remember why the structure existed and who had made it. Like so many objects in public space, it lived on in anonymity.

At the end of the 1980s, the Rietveld structure was rediscovered and received a new location and a new function. It never actually became a bus stop either, but did become a place where artists, designers and architects could show their work or realise a special project. Since 1990, Piet Hein Eek, Robert van Rixtel, Henk Visch and John Körmeling, among others, have been invited to develop a project here.

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