Reality Machines

Provocative, experimental, refreshing, dry, brazen and even crude are common descriptions for the designs in this book. The young Dutch architects, industrial and graphic designers, photographers, and fashion designers assembled here cannot be classified under a single common denominator. However, what they do have in common is their minimalist, pragmatic and often ironic reinterpretation of our everyday reality. This results from their similar concept-based design tactics and leads to an unusual use of existing forms, material and plans. The resulting images and objects seem very familiar at first glance, but on closer examination the subtly deviate from our commonplace reality and raise some questions: where lies the boundary between reality and fiction, and how far does the artificiality of our everyday living environment actually go?
Including almost 70 designs from the last decade, Reality Machines demonstrates that this sense of enstrangement is present in a range of disciplines. The book presents the ingredients of a Dutch design culture which is still proving highly successful, while also pointing to the fact that the designed environment entails a good deal more than architecture alone.