When you enter Rotterdam you find yourself driving through a 'sampler' of late 20th and early 21st century architecture. But not only that. The international port city of Rotterdam is also the home port of a vibrant creative industry. In addition to world-famous firms of architects - Rem Koolhaas’s OMA, West 8 with Adriaan Geuze and the MVRDV collective – you will also find the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi), with an architecture biennial, here. Art colleges such as the Willem de Kooning Academy, art and design courses, the Berlage Institute and the drama courses offered by Codarts have created a good artistic climate to soak up and work in after graduation too. With a multicultural, relatively young population, Rotterdam is also European Youth Capital in 2009.
Designers of international renown, such as Hella Jongerius and Richard Hutten, chose former warehouses for their studios and bases. Fashion designer Marlies Dekkers has her headquarters in Rotterdam. The industrial design agency WAACs Design & Consultancy played an instrumental role in the Senseo, an ingenious coffee machine developed by Philips and coffee producer Douwe Egberts. The work of industrial designer Huibert Groenendijk includes the water taxi, which provides a fast solution to crossing the Maas.
The necessary graphic designers, Studio Dumbar in particular, and multimedia-designers are also active in the city on the Maas. Visual artist/designer Joep van Lieshout even established his own free state, AVL-Ville, with his shocking creations, albeit within Rotterdam’s city boundaries.

Anyone who creates (or not) also wants to experience top-notch enjoyment. When it comes to entertainment, Rotterdam has plenty to offer: the famous International Film Festival Rotterdam, North Sea Jazz Festival, Gergiev Festival, Art Rotterdam and the design events 100% Design and Object Rotterdam, in addition to a Rotterdam Design Prize. In the Museumkwartier (museum district), you can find the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, NAi, Chabot Museum, Rem Koolhaas’s Kunsthal and the modernist monument Villa Sonneveld, all just a stone’s throw from each other.
Added to this, a wide range of events, including the Rotterdam Marathon, Museum Night, the fantastic, multicultural Summer Festival, Formula 1 demonstration drives and the Red Bull Air Race, draw great crowds to Rotterdam. And not forgetting the football clubs, such as Feyenoord, Sparta and Excelsior.
Rotterdam’s ambience as the gateway to the world is tangible in Hotel New York, from where ships of the Holland America Line once set off for the New World. It comes as no surprise that the hotel and restaurant have a pleasant, Rotterdam no-nonsense recalcitrance about them. In the immediate vicinity, you can also find the Photography Museum, housed in the Las Palmas building.

The position Milan occupies for furniture design and Turin for industrial design is comparable to that enjoyed by Rotterdam. Product design not only serves as an expression of lifestyle, but also as a catalyst for innovation, in keeping with Rotterdam’s dynamism.
In the past ten years, the Netherlands has put itself on the world design map, with Droog Design and the many associated designers. There is also two-way traffic between Italy and the Netherlands. Two years ago, for instance, the big Italian furniture brand B&B Italia took a 50% stake in the avant garde design label Moooi, the brainchild of top designer and entrepreneur Marcel Wanders. Moooi presents designs by Bertjan Pot, Jurgen Bey, Joep van Lieshout and Maarten Baas. The latter is famous – or infamous ? – for the deliberately torched furniture he makes for the New York design gallery Moss.

With a host of Dutch and international designers (Jaime Hayon for example), the Rotterdam design gallery Vivid profiles itself as an exhibition space cum platform for designers and public. In the past, Vivid has successfully taken part in leading design fairs in New York, Miami and Basel.
For Casa Rotterdam, which seeks to display Italian ‘designo’ in combination with designs from other countries, Vivid made a representative selection from work by fifteen Rotterdam-based designers.
Jurgen Bey operates on the interface of interior, architecture and design and is not scared to experiment. He makes chairs which seem to melt into each other, introvert armchairs for an insurance company or a tree-trunk bench. Every one an icon of Dutch Design.
His playful furniture and products – such as the two-handled Domoor mug - made Richard Hutten “big in Japan”, a status he manages to qualify with his Rotterdam level-headedness.
With her furniture for such design producers as the Swiss Vitra and consumer ceramics for IKEA and the Frisian Royal Tichelaar, Hella Jongerius links the concept with elegant, appealing styling in her Rotterdam ‘Designlab’.
With their graduation project, a computer-aided version of a baroque table, the Cinderella, Demakersvan (Jeroen Verhoeven, Joep Verhoeven and Judith de Graauw) shot to fame, with their table ending up in the New York Museum of Modern Art.
Only recently, the same thing happened to the Slovak designer Tomás Gabzdil with his Bee Vase. After studying at the Design Academy, Gabzdil set up his studio in Rotterdam. So too the Japanese-German design duo Kuniko Maeda/Mario Minale with their minimalist furniture pieces.
The testing of materials in terms of the strength of carbon fibres inspired Bertjan Pot to create ultra light and transparent furniture, the Carbon Copy Chairs, produced by Moooi.
Rotterdam’s Wieki Somers makes a wide variety of products, balancing between common sense and intuition. A vase appears to bud like a sprig of blossom whilst a porcelain teapot has the shape of a boar’s skull, kept warm by rat fur.
Joris Laarman added an unprecedented decorative twist to the prosaic central heating radiator with a meandering curl. Chris Kabel reduces objects to a basic form, as in his Shady Lace - a parasol with a lacy, foliage canopy.
In addition to his anarchic art projects, Joep van Lieshout makes sturdy seating and has provided many a Dutch museum with colourful plastic lavatory cubicles.
For more than twenty years, Vincent de Rijk has had his studio in Rotterdam. His oeuvre extends from modest ceramic forms to ingenious cupboards, both based on a modular approach. Bas van Beek presents himself with cheeky ceramics, in which he re-interprets existing vases. Frank Bruggeman paints his sturdy furniture in the same signature colour, blue. Christien Meindertsma, finally, focuses her conceptual design studies on animals, such as pigs and sheep.
All of these international designers come from Rotterdam or thereabouts.
Vivid often exhibits new work by them, varying from unique pieces to furniture made for the furniture industry.

Chris Reinewald, design publicist Items and Het Financieele Dagblad.

Dutch design is, according to Bas van Beek, stagnant. Not for want of better talent with brighter ideas, but because the industry is emasculated by it’s own anti-intellectual mentality.
The same names, the same references and an output of work that leaves the same grin on the mostly uncritical critic. It’s all gone on for too long.

Van Beek’s point is that the big name Dutch designers are doing nothing original. Rather, they are designing for a bourgeois mentality that itself is hankering for a long-lost era that was decorated with pretty things.

“Designers are fully aware of this new market of wealthy people who desire such status symbols,” he says. “It’s made up mostly of middle-aged women who wanted to be artistic and had ambitions to paint, but gave up to have children … now they want to buy the objects of designers like Hella Jongerius, but what they actually want to buy is her fabricated identity.”

Van Beek’s beef with this is the impact it has on a designer’s work. “It’s such a specific ‘creative’ aesthetic,” he says. “Of course they are all just catering to a market demand, and then pretending they are doing high design. It’s ridiculous.”

And what worsens the predicament is Van Beek’s other pet peeve, the dismal state of intellectual discourse that should be but isn’t harnessing and challenging Dutch design. “It’s full of morons,” is one of his more delicate descriptive statements.

Like in architecture and literature, design can be a prism through which ideas are argued, realized and critiqued. “But architects are much smarter,” he says. “There are a lot of people in that field studying independently of the big firms who can talk and write freely. Design really misses that.”

Design discourse, Van Beek says, moves to the background as whatever trend comes into play. “And right now it is star designers and limited editions,” he says. “The subjective value of the trend is more important than the objective values of the actual products.”

Of the Dutch, Van Beek enjoys the work of Dick van Hoff and the product and packaging design created at Unilever. Internationally, the work of the Bouroullec brothers interests him most.

Van Beek’s renegade stance runs deep. It’s no enfant terrible act for the sake of it. He graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam with a 3D scan of his own faeces. “It was a critique on computer generated architecture,” he explains. “Architects said they’d use it [computers] as a tool for new forms, but everyone knew that it was really their erection under their desks generating the shapes.

“So I decided to write down everything I ate for a day and then the following morning I generated architecture, which I scanned in three dimensionally so people could download it themselves.”

Unsurprisingly, the work caused a lot of fuss and it turned Van Beek off design. Instead, he spent a few years doing “a regular person’s job” behind a desk. But being regular was never going to pan out so with some caution he returned to design with some very basic but personal work that focused on pure ideas. “I created some physical objects out of basic concepts,” he says. The objects – chair and table - were bought by the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, a success that inspired him to start his anti-xenophobic, anti-elitist, highly democratic run with his first collection called “Rip-Offs,” which he followed up with “Prequels.”

The first series played around with six different versions of ten vases comprising known and (previously) unique pieces with parts that were interchangeable. Van Beek has described the results as being “Like the tragedy of a cover band.” After that, he moved back a few steps during a residency at the European Ceramic Work Center by creating hybrid forms out of his own moulds joined together with regular hobby moulds. This time, he says, he created “and elevated state of mediocrity.”

Van Beek remains bemused by much of the criticism that his approach to copying and appropriating has ignited. “They say I’m not original, but who really is?” he asks. “The ‘creative’ way to express it is to call it inspiration, but in the end it is the same thing.”

Using Hollywood as an analogy, Van Beek says all Dutch design does, and seems to understand, is romantic comedy. “But there are many more genres,” he says, “Thriller, documentary, drama, bad films and B-films ... I’m just trying to explore those genres. In Hollyood, all genres are accepted and all genres need serious critique to survive. It works like a self-cleansing apparatus.”

With a copy of “Disneyization of Society” sitting by his side, Van Beek continues: “It all comes back to the industry lacking any real and credible critique. There is so much censorship. It is all self-referential, incestuous, and packed with self-congratulations. Even when interesting lectures are organized, it is always the same people there with their same friends and industry people.”

Van Beek strikes down any suggestion that the industry isn't yet ripe for such open attack. “That’s complete nonsense,” he says. “We already had it in Visies op Vormgeving (Views on Design). In that [book] everyone ripped at everyone and had something open and honest to say. It was fantastic.”

Van Beek’s next series, Royal Rip Offs for the Nationaal Glasmuseum Leerdam celebrates all those facets of design he believes in like altering the existing production process rather then inventing a new one. He deplores the idea of setting up independent factories, which he says is nothing better than establishing more sweat shops, which are completely unnecessary given the system and set-ups that already exist.

The push for exclusivity, anti-mass production and limited editions are all, according to Van Beek, a type of neo-colonial exploitation. “Designers that obsess over this think that their approach can save the world, but really it is just this xenophobic longing for the past,” he says. “What my work shows is that you can use existing processes to generate new forms thus devaluing the limited edition.”

“But current Dutch design isn’t all rubbish,” Van Beek concludes magnanimously. “I do have hope.”

Bas Van Beek’s collection for Pols Potten comes out on April 19th.
His Royal Rip Offs exhibition opens in the Nationaal Glasmuseum Leerdam on Match 20.