Bunker 599

Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances | Atelier de Lyon

Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances and Atelier de Lyon created Bunker 599 by dissecting a bunker that is part of Dutch cultural heritage and which was part of the UNESCO World Heritage-nominated New Duch Waterline. As Erik and Ronald Rietveld  write, the work “shed new light on the Dutch and UNESCO policies on cultural heritage. At the same time, it makes people look at their surroundings in a new way. The bunker becomes the entrance to an 80 km long potential park of the twenty-first century, the New Dutch Waterline Park. A seemingly indestructible bunker with monumental status is sliced open. Paradoxically, after the intervention Bunker 599 became a Dutch national monument, so it “increased” in monumental value”.

The Rietvelds continue, “Bunker 599 is a spatial thinking model; a vision on the future of the practice of historic preservation. Interventions like this avoid that we forget “a past that might trouble us. This dissected monument embodies and imagination-based approach toward preservation. The work: breaks through existing conventions; breaks through a seemingly indestructible structure; breaks though different disciplines; and  breaks though past and present, looking for new meaning in the future.”

Read about Bunker 559 in Erik and Ronald Rietveld’s 2017 article “Hardcore heritage: imagination for preservation” that appeared in Frontiers in Psychology 8: 1-3, and from which the quotations above were taken, Follow this link:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5702488/

More information, videos, and images of Bunker 559 are available at these sites:

http://www.delyon.nl/mk.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgekYavYdtI

https://www.flickr.com/search/?w=30889238@N06&q=bunker%20599

https://www.designboom.com/architecture/rietveld-landscape-atelier-de-lyon-bunker-599/

Find more about Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances here:

https://www.raaaf.nl/nl/

https://www.dezeen.com/tag/rietveld-landscape/

https://www.raaaf.nl/downloads/Portfolio%20RAAAF%20-%20ENG%202019.pdf

You can find out more about Atelier de Lyon here:

http://www.delyon.nl/index.html