Slow Car

source: highlike

Work: The campus is where the world of work is developing and the Slow Car is part of a series of rethought infrastructures that speculate about the way we make places to work. 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. A very fast office chair or a slow car.
Photographer: Studio Makkink & Bey
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
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.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: design-reportde

Die Gedankengänge des niederländischen Designers Jurgen Bey sind ähnlich vertrackt wie die Stadtszenarien, die er für die Messestände des Büromöbelherstellers Prooff zeichnet. Über seine
Produktentwürfe, die von Droog, Moooi und Vitra produziert werden, redet er nur am Rande, tattdessen träumt er von Angestellten, die freiwillig im Büro übernachten und Putzfrauen, die so schön fegen, als würden sie Bach­Sonaten spielen. · Jurgen Bey, geboren 1965 in Soest, ist einer der bekanntesten niederländischen Designer. In den 90er Jahren, direkt nach seinem Studium an der Design Academy in Eindhoven, gehörte er zu den Ersten, die mit Droog Design international erfolgreich waren. Damals beschäftigte er sich viel mit gefundenen Objekten,
machte aus einem Baumstamm mithilfe einiger Stuhllehnen die „Treetrunk Bench“ und aus einem alten Kronleuchter mit einem neuen Lampenschirm den „Light Shade Shade“, der noch immer zu den meistverkauften Produkten von Moooi gehört. Seit 2002 führt Bey gemeinsam mit seiner Frau, der Architektin Rianne Makkink, das Studio Makkink & Bey und arbeitet unter anderem für Vitra, aber auch noch immer für Droog Design. Gleichzeitig ist er Art Director des 2006 gegründeten Büromöbelherstellers Prooff. Das Studio Makkink & Bey befindet sich in einer zugigen
alten Fabrik im Gewerbegebiet zwischen Rotterdam und Schiedam. Im schlauchförmigen Raum steht ein Zelt, in dem ein Dutzend Mitarbeiter sitzt, umgeben von halb verpackten Produkten und Styrodur­Modellen. Mit leiser Stimme und völlig ohne Starallüren erläutert Bey sein eigenwilliges Design­ und Weltbild.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: energielexpansion

A l’inverse, on peut imaginer que la voiture de demain soit au contraire conçue comme une sorte de boîte, dans laquelle on s’enferme, seul, pour réfléchir ou travailler. C’est le concept du “slow car” que défend depuis des mois, à la stupéfaction générale, le célèbre designer hollandais Jurgen Bey. L’idée est d’utiliser cette “bulle privée” dans des espaces comme les campus ou les aéroports. En se déplaçant lentement (moins de 40 km/h), l’utilisateur devrait bouleverser la perception de la voiture, ressentir un grand calme intérieur et donc atteindre une bonne concentration pour le travail…