Ronald Rietveld is the fourth speaker at This happened – Utrecht #7

I’m hap­py to say we have our fourth speak­er con­firmed for next Mon­day’s This hap­pened. Here’s the blurb:

Land­scape archi­tect Ronald Rietveld talks about Vacant NL. The instal­la­tion chal­lenges the Dutch gov­ern­ment to use the enor­mous poten­tial of inspir­ing, unused build­ings from the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st cen­tu­ry for cre­ative entre­pre­neur­ship and inno­va­tion. The Dutch gov­ern­ment wants to be in the top 5 of world knowl­edge economies by the end of 2020. Vacant NL takes this polit­i­cal ambi­tion seri­ous­ly and lever­ages vacan­cy to stim­u­late inno­va­tion with­in the cre­ative knowl­edge econ­o­my. Vacant NL is the Dutch sub­mis­sion for the Venice Archi­tec­ture Bien­nale 2010. It is made by Rietveld Land­scape, which Ronald Rietveld found­ed after win­ning the Prix de Rome in Archi­tec­ture 2006. In 2003 he grad­u­at­ed with hon­ors from the Ams­ter­dam Acad­e­my of Archi­tec­ture.

At first sight this might be an odd one out, and archi­tec­tur­al exhi­bi­tion at an inter­ac­tion design event. But both the sub­ject of the instal­la­tion and the design of the expe­ri­ence deal with inter­ac­tion in many ways. So I am sure it will pro­vide atten­dees with valu­able insights.