יורגן ביי
ユルゲン·ベイ
Юрген Бей

Slow Car

source: arttubenl

Jurgen Bey is een visionair ontwerper die de dingen graag naar een hoger niveau tilt. Bey is beroemd om zijn boomstambank, met klassieke stoelleuningen gegoten in brons, zijn Light Shade Shade, een spiegellamp die tijdens de dag de omgeving weerspiegelt en wanneer hij wordt aangestoken een luchter blijkt te bevatten, en zijn Oorstoelen, grote leunstoelen met enorme oren waarin mensen ongestoord privégesprekken kunnen voeren in openbare ruimtes.

Met Prooff, wat staat voor Progressive Office, onderzoekt Bey nieuwe manieren van samenwerken. Werk is tegenwoordig te veel uitsluitend gericht op geld verdienen, vindt de ontwerper, terwijl volgens hem de nadruk zou moeten liggen op het delen van kennis en het uitwisselen van ideeën. Een onderdeel van Prooff is de Slow Car, nu nog een prototype. Wanneer het landschap waarin we werken is omgevormd tot een collectieve campus, zal de Slow Car het mobiele kantoor zijn waarin we ons voortbewegen.

Jurgen Bey neemt zijn tijd om onze handelingen te observeren en intrinsieke kwaliteiten te ontdekken in dingen die vaak over het hoofd gezien worden. Hiervoor waagt hij zich buiten het alledaagse en baant hij zich zijn eigen, oorspronkelijke weg – een werkethiek die hij graag ook bij bedrijven ingang zou zien vinden.
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source: arttubenl

Jurgen Bey is a visionary designer who likes to take things to the next level. Bey is famous for his tree trunk bench, with classical chair backs cast in bronze, his Light Shade Shade, a mirror lamp that reflects its surroundings during the day, and reveals a chandelier within once it’s lit, and his Ear Chairs, big armchairs with giant ears that allow people to have private conversations in public spaces.

With Prooff – which stands for Progressive Office – Bey explores new ways of working together. Work nowadays is too focused on making money alone, while, according to the designer, the emphasis should be on sharing knowledge and exchanging ideas. Part of Prooff is the slow car, now still a prototype. When the landscape in which we work is transformed into a collective campus, the slow car will be the mobile office in which we travel.

Jurgen Bey takes his time to observe our actions and to discover intrinsic qualities in things that are often overlooked. For this, he ventures beyond the ordinary and creates his own original path. A work ethic he would like to see companies adopt as well.
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source: vitra

A campus (Latin for ‘field’) is an open space, usually grassy, which is gradually surrounded by buildings until it becomes the heart of a university. The campus begins as a field, transformed temporarily into a building site. Later it becomes a sports field, often performs as a place of political demonstration, and then becomes a garden. It ossifies in this final form, perhaps embellished by memorial statues or fountains, passed through by generations of students. Occasionally it reverts back to its earlier incarnations, as new groups charge the space with politics again. Later, the whole complex – field and buildings – is referred to as the campus. The university is conceived, we could say, as a field of operations that is deliberately undetermined, defined by its inhabitants through social congress. It is thought that the word ‘campus’ was first used to refer to the grounds of Princeton University in New Jersey. In other words, it is an American space. European universities are traditionally urban, taking their forms directly from monasteries. It is striking, when you visit an American university, that the campus is the only space of many American towns designed principally for pedestrians (apart from parks, perhaps). The campus is not part of the grid, it is not built to maximize financial returns or aid automotive mobility. It is intended as a place of social exchange. It is as close as American cities get to a European piazza – a place within the grid, the particular within the generic.

The campus, says Jurgen Bey, is how the world of work is developing, and, he says, the Slow Car is part of a series of rethought infrastructures that speculate about the way we make places work. His ideas attempt to suggest how we might turn the generic into the specific. He has made wall-sized illustrations of massive cranes building modular skyscrapers and themselves being incorporated into the buildings. At their feet are beetle-like cars that form the personal space of this plan. While the idea of the Slow Car has many obvious and practical effects on road safety, the environment, and so on, its most interesting potential is social: it is a machine that could transform what Marc Augé would call the nonplaces of the contemporary world into places more like a campus. Think of an airport. It is a sprawling mass of a building, made completely contingent and defined by security and pedestrian mobility. There is no exterior public space at all. There are shopping centres but no public spaces. There is nothing particular, and no hope of it. But imagine a fleet of moving rooms, places where you could sit, sleep, keep your luggage, and use to transport you to a park or a church. If all corners of the place were within reach of every passenger then how might that transform the character of these generic places? How much more time might one want to spend there? Where would the civic centre of an airport be, and what would it look like? The airport is the funnel through which pass the skills, knowledge and talent of any international industry. Imagine if those people could drive themselves to a park, or perhaps into a huge library, teeming with tiny, personalized cars, beetling around like workers in a quarry. This project is an enabling infrastructure of mobile rooms that could make shared spaces in generic places.

Beyond the airport, the 40 km/h speed limit of the Slow Car slows down the city. Perhaps the campus model could work at this scale. The Slow Car suggests mobility at the scale of the largest city, but not the scale of a country. The city is the Slow Car’s field of operation. As a result, it is liberated from aesthetic conventions that dramatize mobility. It is clearly free from aerodynamics, for example. It has another purpose. It is more like a small building, a shelter that allows us to experience public spaces at a much larger scale. It allows us to live at the scale of the city; it extends the territory you can call your neighbourhood.