Artwork Data

Title

Oerwoud Ypenburg

Artist

Overtreders W

Year

2009

Material

Metaal, beschilderd

Artwork Location

Address

Oeverwallaan 104-106, Den Haag

City district

Leidschenveen-Ypenburg

GPS data

52.031475601373, 4.3817888436554 View on map

Artwork Description

Text

Whether or not you like living there depends not only on the house you live in. The street it is on, the road to work and the children's schoolyard also play a role. The young and successful spatial design agency Overtreders W focuses on precisely these 'secondary residential areas'. Reinder Bakker and Hester van Dijk, both educated at the Eindhoven Design Academy, design interiors and small pavilions in which the changing landscape, social cohesion in neighbourhoods and sustainability are the important themes. By involving local residents in the design process, they ensure that they once again become co-owners of their own environment.

This also happened in the new housing estate of Ypenburg. When two primary schools on the Oeverwallaan were given new accommodation in 2008, money for art became available through the schools percentage scheme. Stroom Den Haag commissioned Overtreders W to do the job. Because these designers observed that there are few forests in Ypenburg and its surroundings, they came up with a temporary and artificial jungle. After all, trees and plants give a different view of the landscape. Moreover, this way children can play and dream in forests. Bakker and Van Dijk asked the children from the two primary schools to draw leaves and animals from the jungle. They used the most beautiful ones in their artificial jungle.

Scattered across the schoolyard, bushes of tall stems with large, imaginative leaves rise up from the pavement. On these leaves, the most diverse animals and insects from the jungle can be found: little beetles, butterflies, chameleons. Sometimes even new species. The image that this work of art conjures up is as clear as the colours of each individual metal stem with leaves and animals. This clear, imaginative language of form is as characteristic of Overtreders W as the cooperation with the children.

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