Jeroen Musch
Seeing is a creative act. It is very important to learn how to look within the disciplines of architecture, urban design and landscape architecture. That's why the Academy of Architecture has invited photographer Jeroen Musch (1964) as an Artist in Residence in 2016-2017.
Musch was educated at the Rietveld Academy, lives in Rotterdam and works internationally. A photographer with a proven record in various fields of photography. With his temporary presence as Artist in Residence Jeroen Musch is asked to throw students off balance through asking the unusual, the unorthodox; through a certain uneasiness, an imbalance, caused by having to learn how to experience time and space through the sensors of the photographer.
Winter school
The theme of the Academy of Architecture’s 2017 Winter School is ‘seeing’. Seeing is more than ‘looking’. Seeing is about understanding, seeing is about feeling, seeing is about valuing. This is a skill which designers like architects, urbanists and landscape architects should master more and more in today’s ‘searching times’, in which society is becoming increasingly diverse and developments are not always the logical outcome of programmatic needs anymore.
With their natural curiosity and trained ability to imagine use and space, designers could also lead the way in seeing. If designers want their design proposals to be taken seriously, it’s their responsibility to be serious about influencing the way we look at space and place. ‘Place’ is the issue in particular. What is the appropriate thing to suggest, try or do in a specific case? What does not follow on from programmatic or conceptual thinking? What if ‘specificness’, not ‘genericness’, is the ambition?
The Academy invited Jeroen Musch to be curator and inspirator of the 2017 Winter School. Being a photographer originally trained as an architect, he‘s uniquely qualified to fulfil these roles. The subject of study will be the former Naval Barracks (the 'Marineterrein') in Amsterdam. An intriguing piece of city in the center of Amsterdam. It has recently been made accessible to a wider public and is a site everybody is looking at. We’re going to help them truly see it!
Final presentations
The Winter School is organised as a competition in which students worked together in studios of no more than 10 students on one product, in this case a movie with a duration of 3.13 minutes. A total of 18 studios will take part in the competition. Each studio was composed in an interdisciplinairy way, consisting of students of architecture, urbanism and landscape architecture. Also there was a prize to be won. The jury consisted of Liesbeth Jansen (Project director Marineterrein), Jeroen Musch (AIR), Madeleine Maaskant, Arjan Klok, Jan Richard Kikkert and Maike van Stiphout (Board of Studies of the Academy of Architecture). The following publication 'Me: Seeing is a Creative Act' provides an overview of the 3: 13-minute films made by the students during this project.