Stedelijk Museum CS

Note: this entry is part of a larger group of texts about the SMCS assignment. To read the full story about this project, start at SMCS / Introduction, and click through all the successive pages from there.
On another note – we wrote the texts below quite a while ago. We just reread them, and noticed some of them seem a bit outdated, and might need to be rewritten. Some of the used images need some reworking as well. We'll do this in the near future.

The title walls were an important part of the sign system. Just as the rest of the signage (see SMCS / Sign system 1 and 2), these titles consisted entirely of A4-sized document holders. Shown in this chapter are a few examples.

First of all, the title wall for the exhibition 20/20 Vision. The design of this wall was actually based on a small flyer that we made for this exhibition (See SMCS / Printed matter). The theme of this group show revolved around the idea of visual culture, so on the title wall we showed the 20/20 Vision logotype in different sizes, to refer to optical tests. Below some photos showing this particular title wall:



Not related to the A4 document holders, but still a nice photograph, are these three A0-sized prints that we designed as temporary signs that were used during the night the show opened:

Secondly, the title wall for the exhibition Time and Again (shown below). This was a group show of young Polish artists, with a theme that revolved roughly around a certain post-post-soviet sensibility. To underline this theme, we used colours that referred to the colours of carbon copy forms and other bureaucratic papers. (See also SMCS / Invitations).

The sculpture in the front is a work by artists' collective Little Warsaw.


Shown below a wall that is related to the title walls that we designed for '20/20 Vision' and 'Time and Again', but is actually something completely different: the wall we designed for the Piet Elling exhibition. It's not a title wall for an exhibition, but the exhibition itself.
We were asked to design a small exhibition on the life and work of Piet Elling (1897–1962), the original architect of the Post Office building, temporary location of SMCS. There was no budget, and no time, so we decided to design the exhibition using just A4 document holders.

On the exhibition wall, we showed eight photographs, and a long text containing captions and background information. The eight photographs were placed in a very specific order, playing with the idea of scale and proportion:


Photos (c) 2004 by Gert-Jan van Rooij.