Since founding her Amsterdam office, Inside Outside, in 1991, Petra Blaisse has been exploring interior and landscape architecture, often simultaneously in the same project. Miami Art Museum director Terence Riley describes her work as “reinvigorating two things that are traditionally considered women’s domains—curtains and gardens—by infusing them with unexpected materials and a poet’s sense of metaphor and sensuality.”

Blaisse began her career by working as an exhibition designer at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art. There, 20 years ago, she met Rem Koolhaas when she designed his firm’s first museum show, beginning a professional and personal partnership that has been compared to that of Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. Initially, Koolhaas’s firm OMA hired her to design their shows, but, as OMA began to receive real commissions, she became involved in those too. For the Netherlands Dance Theater, completed in 1987, she designed her first curtain, an opulent, gold-stamped creation that Herbert Muschamp of the New York Times has called “the logo for the building.”

Her numerous projects since, often with OMA, include the Museum Park in Rotterdam, the restoration of the Hackney Empire Theatre in London, and the Seattle Public Library, for which she designed the landscape and interior with its “garden carpets.” Like all her work, these reveal a lyrical preoccupation with change and movement, as well as a highly practical approach in using soft materials like drapes and carpets, and natural
elements like planting and landscaping, to solve issues of acoustics, lighting, and visibility. She has also designed a wallpaper collection, Touch, for Wolf-Gordon.

In a sense, there’s nothing new about what we’re doing—because, of course, all modernist architecture is based on this relationship between inside and outside. But we are interested in exploring it in a way that’s more intriguing than just putting a glass box into a landscape. So one theme of our work is leading people to experience the building not just in its landscape but as part of the landscape. In our design of the Museum Park around the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, you approach the building through a landscape, and then the field of chairs in the interior refers to a field of flowers, and there’s a curtain which is like a ball gown but also like a tree—and it’s as if the garden continues into the building, ending on the sloping roof garden.

For the Seattle Public Library, we continued on the same theme. We designed the gardens, and inside, where we needed carpets to make a welcoming statement and for the acoustics, it was logical to design carpets that were printed with plants. It was another way of introducing the exterior space into the interior. So the whole building is about looking inside and looking outside. Curtains weren’t needed here, because the structure itself is like a curtain. Only in the auditorium, the most inward space, were our curtains implemented.

It is. I want to emphasize gardenlike situations because I believe they represent a longing for something we all recognize. The garden has symbolic importance in every culture. It stands for meditation, relaxation, life, our inner world; it is about memory, beauty, and consolation.

I know—it’s terrible! Sometimes our work is interpreted as a soft, feminine touch added at the last minute, but actually it’s part of the whole evolution of the space. The drapes, carpets, and other finishes we implement inside, or the planting outside, they’re all composed right from the beginning, emerging from a discussion about the public space in its entirety with all those involved in the project—engineers, architects, the city or corporation, and so on. And everything is done on a monumental scale. This dictates our work. It’s not about thinking, Oh, let’s just soften these hard, masculine lines of architecture, not at all. We challenge architecture with our work!

Historical costume. Old paintings show that textiles had an amazing power to communicate time, culture, mood, status, and influence. Textiles trigger some historic human memory. The work we do refers to that tradition, but not in a personal sense. We’ve taken it and disconnected it from the body and the private home, so it serves a group identity. The curtain we did for the Netherlands Dance Theater has become part of the image of the whole institution, as did the curtains for the McCormick Tribune Center in Chicago and the curtains in the Casa da Musica in Porto—as strong as
the architecture itself.

But the lace curtain is a very elegant solution—it symbolizes a territory line, but you can still look through it. Our work is directly connected to this. If we design a curtain to keep out the light, we still have holes or slits in it—we always have this link to what is behind it either mentally, as illusion, or physically. And curtains can always move—they come and go. They talk to the imagination in a way that fixed architecture does not. I’m interested in this movement, in pushing it further, even in a domestic context. We worked on a villa in Bordeaux, where the curtain track takes the role of a path—it leads you through the space and takes you outside to the roofed terrace. You can make curtains that disappear, curtains people can control or that can move by motor at different speeds—and suddenly you have an added story.

Our work can add a touch of luxury, but more important a technical solution, relatively cheaply. This is a poor time for technical innovations and materials—many materials are now too expensive to use. Architecture today is about communication—of corporate, market-related messages, chiefly—and volume, imposing big spaces. And often forced to use cheap solutions! So we can add a tactile aspect to these generic elements or spaces. Intelligence in architecture now often comes down to the way common materials are used—the scale used, their relationship to each other, and so on. And we also have a limited choice of materials—we can only use fire-retardant textiles, and even paints must fulfill environmental criteria. We have to be inventive with limited means. We’re always researching new materials, but so little is usable. It is about reinventing.

We’re also adding the perspective of time. Gardens grow, so they are part of a natural time line. It takes anything from 10 to 50 years for a garden to mature. In this sense, adding a garden to a landscape is the very opposite of adding a sculpture. As a designer you can’t control the future of a garden. You demand the input of generations to continue the work. The textiles we use have a different relationship with time. They degrade, they age fast, and they show wear. They have traces of use. This becomes part of their quality.

For the Toledo Museum of Art, in Ohio, we’re working with SANAA architects (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa ) on curtains that must be invisible, or so barely visible, so ethereal, that they don’t detract from the weightless, transparent architecture at all. Our only possible input is the detail of the stitching or laser cutting of the seams and hems, but we are bound to want to design something, however minimal it may be.

To create more intricate solutions. There’s this European longing for renewedphilosophy and content now—not just the market mentality. We’re all looking for ways to reinvent communal ambition in architecture, arts, politics, and every other domain. I want us to be part of that.