Inside Outside / Petra Blaisse

Since its foundation in 1991, the Amsterdam based studio Inside Outside / Petra Blaisse has realized world-wide projects ranging from the design of textiles and exhibitions and the production of entire interiors to landscape architecture. As the name implies, the variable relationship between inside and outside is a central issue that feeds into the interdisciplinary approach of combining knowledge and craftsmanship from several fields. From the start, Inside Outside has collaborated closely with the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and with many other architects, curators and artisans.

Inside Outside creates spaces that are interrelated and hybrid, interacts with specific surroundings and challenges our expectations through an often startlingly unconventional use of materials and techniques. Two large-scale curtains produced for the exhibition present a retrospective of Inside Outside’s work. They literally unfold the studio’s production strategies, as illustrated by Blaisse’s “recipe drawings”, which not only detail the craft involved in production but also give an insight into the studio’s systematic approach to design. The exhibition is designed to represent the “Giardini di Porta Nuova”—a large-scale landscape project in Milan which inaugurated at the end of October 2018 after nearly a decade of work. Referencing the typology of a botanical garden, the park takes up the idea of a “library of trees”, which transforms this urban project into a cultural campus. Here, tape laid out on the floor, like the lines in a gym, trace the paths through the park, while circular “brushes”, produced for earlier interior designs, each mark a stand of one species of tree.

The exhibition is produced in collaboration with gta exhibitions, ETH Zurich and was first shown in October 2018 in the main hall at ETH Zurich Zentrum.