Interiors Central Space and Studio Space – Buro Stedelijk (2023)
Type: Interior Design
Concept: Setareh Noorani and Jelmer Teunissen
Client: Buro Stedelijk / Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Build: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam team, LevTec
Photography: Tom Philip Janssen
Selected press:
‘Rehearsing institutional de-scripting: A machine for manifestations‘, essay in How We Made Noise: Reimagining the Museum from Within, ed. Rita Ouedraogo
Manifestation #1: Listening Session, on the interior design concept
De Groene – Uit de Ruïnes
We routinely inhabit spatial structures inherited from wanted or unwanted lineages, scripts sanctioned by capitalist, neoliberal, and colonial systems that dictate everything from the redlining of bodies to behavioral controls within the “white cube” of the museum. This project situates its architectural intervention within a discourse of intersectional feminist, queer, and abolitionist thought, seeking to foreground active dismantling as a generative design practice. Prompted by Buro Stedelijk, an institution physically intertwined with the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the work wrestles with a unique institutional paradox: how to institute oneself while remaining in a self-sanctioned act of dismantling, or as Fred Moten and Édouard Glissant suggest, consenting “not to be a single being.” Surrounded by spectres of power and public scrutiny, the design actively embraces temporality, decay, and institutional critique, turning the site into a space that negotiates glass doors, security fencing, and exclusive traditional scripts to invite in historically excluded constituencies.
To deconstruct these institutional frameworks, the project re-tools the spatial mechanisms of the museum, transforming the rigid grid into a fluid, open-ended entity where the boundary between permanence and impermanence is blurred. Rather than relying on static architectural overhauls, the first phase introduces a vocabulary of “enabling constraints”: highly flexible, facilitative tools and surfaces such as a dynamic rail system, adaptable curtains, a dedicated backstage storage room, and a responsive lighting layout. These elements act as architectural prompts that allow users to rewrite how they look, feel, and move through the space.
Materially, the intervention disrupts the pristine, exclusionary aura of the traditional gallery through sustainable, circular, and highly tactile strategies. Instead of painting over surfaces, the project utilizes fabrics reused from a previous exhibition within the Stedelijk Museum, simultaneously cutting costs and layering the space with variable tints. These architectural offerings are inherently durable, easy to assemble, and highly modular, ensuring they can be stored, adapted, or ultimately disassembled as the institution evolves. By emphasizing acts of layering, material reuse, and abstract composition the design shifts the focus from a finished aesthetic to a continuous, reciprocal process, expanding the building’s programming to facilitate its manifestations.
