Witte de With and TENT. present Shared Space II, a spatial design on the 1st floor by Rotterdam based designer Sebastiaan Straatsma.
In 2008, Shared Space consisted of a king-size sofa and a outdoor mirror by Bertjan Pot accompanied by loud blue wall furniture, a plant container and a paper shredder by Frank Bruggeman.
The design made by Sebastiaan Straatsma will ‘wrap up’ the 2009 Shared Space. In his vision for the space, Straatsma took seven vintage chairs as his point of departure. He designed a contemporary version of the bamboo hanging chairs of the seventies: the cushions are not as high and the chairs are transparent so that you can see through them. Both the chairs and the walls are painted blue so that the physical experience of swinging is visually extended.
Straatsma makes use of emotional experiences and disrupts the relationship between form and function. He added a rubber handmade layer to a famous Thonet chair, thus personalizing it. His series of monumental filigree vases with the humoristic title Dustcollectors, consist of lively braids of decorative motives that do not have any use value. In Straatsma’s designs beauty, aesthetics and our affective relationship to the object are the most important criteria to experience the work
Sebastiaan Straatsma graduated from the Design Academy in Eindhoven in 1999. He eventually started his own design studio. For more information about his work, please consult his website www.sebastiaanstraatsma.com.