Frans Hals Prize for Exhibition Design @ NRC Handelsblad

Publication Frans Hals Prize for Exhibition Design, Carel Kuitenbrouwer @ NRC Handelsblad, Rotterdam, 14 September 1988

An
exhibition
design
must
also
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feasible.

The Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. To celebrate, the museum established the Frans Hals Prize for exhibition design, which was awarded for the first time on 2 September. “The prize should be an impetus for innovative and, if possible, more efficient design,” reads the jury report, which goes on to say that the prize will be awarded every two years from now on. The winner of the first prize is young industrial designer Paul Linse, who graduated cum laude from the Eindhoven Academy of Industrial Design in 1987.

The subject of the competition was the design of the Frans Hals Museum’s anniversary exhibition, currently on display in the Vishal, about the Hollandia film factory, also from Haarlem, which between 1912 and ’23 produced an unparalleled production of silent play and documentary films. Models and some sketches of the other competition entries can be seen in the museum itself. Most of these models do not really show what the various entrants must have had in mind. What they do show is mostly unspectacular or even obvious. The design bureau A&a, for instance, proposed swinging a gigantic film strip through the entire fish hall and incorporating the catalogue in a film canister. It could hardly be more clichéd.

This is by no means true of the design by Frans Vogelaar of London. He produced a magnificent and dazzling scale model that, if executed, would have had an overwhelming and disconcerting effect on the visitor. The open network of forms constructed from scrap-like material was therefore called a “brilliant plan” by the jury. But the uncertainties, which this design raises about precisely that execution, helped the jury to decide to award Linse’s design.

Of his design, the jury report praised especially the connection to the architecture of the Vishal, but also the subdivision of the space. For this exhibition, the prize winner started “from what film evoked in me: principles such as frames, movement, illusion and light/dark differences”. Linse achieved the connection to the architecture by reflecting the shape of the glass roof in the middle section of the Fish Hall in a valley-like landscape, which stretches the entire length of that hall. Surrounding that light central section are the galleries that he turned into dark corridors, in which there is the romantic atmosphere of a cinema theatre.

The Frans Hals Museum’s initiative to establish this prize was somewhat crippled this time by lack of time, which meant that open entry had to be waived, and by the need for feasibility of the chosen design, which meant that the most challenging design could not be awarded. Hopefully, on future occasions, the discussion on ‘the medium of exhibition’ will also be better nourished by full presentation of the competing entries.

The sketch designs for the exhibition ‘Hollywood in Holland’ that competed for the Frans Hals Prize are on display at the Frans Hals Museum until 23.10. Groot Heilig Land 62 Haarlem; Mon-Sat 11.00-17.00, Sun 13.00-17.00. The exhibition itself can be seen, also until 23.10, at the Vishal on the Grote Markt.