Studio Makkink/Bey

Essay by museum director Guus Beumer

Which transitions has Dutch Design gone trough since its establishment in the early 1990s and how does Studio Makkink&Bey relate to these developments? The essay ‘Studio Makkink/Bey’ describes the hybrid work practice of Rianne Makkink and Jurgen Bey throughout two decades.

It is worth noting that rational considerations played no part in the founding of Studio Makkink/Bey. Its origins are rooted in love, nurtured by camaraderie and a deep-felt empathy for one another’s philosophy as designer. 

She contributed to an architecture shaped by narrative and, as a designer, abandoned the notion of a presupposed use in favour of an expressive, spatial potential, resulting in, among other things, the founding of the maxwan architectural practice. 

His early work was characterized by what would later – in retrospect, of course – be labelled Dutch Design, and made his name as the designer who introduced a sense of disorientation to the domestic interior. Instead of the immaculate transparency so typical of a modernist aesthetic, he offered mystery and astonishment, on one celebrated occasion attaching cast-bronze Biedermeier chair backs to a tree trunk, challenging the viewer to imagine in what kind of space, expressing what kind of desire it might stand.

Picture Jurgen Bey’s house in Rotterdam which, thanks to his many experiments, had been reduced to a Swiss cheese porosity, held together solely by the occupant’s boundless energy.

Picture another home in Rotterdam, that of Rianne Makkink, who carried on developing models that are both transient and hybrid and who recast her apartment as salon/storage and on another occasion as cattery/showroom. 

At some point they decided to merge, or rather blend, their practices and his talent for the disorienting object was detached from a domestic setting, while her fascination with hybrids was incorporated into the potential repertoire of design products. Ground plan became pattern, the model became the end product, while the domesticated interior turned into a landscape for Makkink/Bey and thus into an infinite universe, an endless source of utopian reflections. 

Supposing that Dutch Design, setting aside the unvarying debates about nationality and identity, or aesthetic versus mentality, were for once to be understood as a unique public/private project from the early 1990s, as the transient fruits of a collective, as the sum of a few big and many more small contributions by curators, policy makers, designers, politicians, teachers and theorists – how might we then interpret the development and current position of Studio Makkink/Bey?

In recent times, and for the sake of convenience let’s take 2005 as the starting point, public funding has dwindled and policy makers and designers have become convinced that the cultural success of Dutch Design should be monetized. According to the prevailing thinking the only reality was that of the market and so, in the context of Dutch Design, its earlier endorsement of craftsmanship could also be sold as a form of luxury marketing. Likewise, that once disorienting visual language could be construed as a form of theatricality and as such a response to the consumer’s insatiable appetite for new images. In the past decade, these strategic realignments – you could call it a repositioning – of the notion of Dutch Design have played a crucial part in the success of a few individual members, but they have also served to obscure the one-time collective project: a project that was fundamentally – and perhaps even unwittingly – aimed at freeing the designer from the obligation to answer to a client and a local industry. Thanks to public funding, designers were given the space and time to develop their own capacity to commission and to experiment. In other words, Dutch designers were accorded the opportunities and resources of the Dutch artist and as a corollary of that were imbued – and once again, no doubt unwittingly – with the ideology of the artist as critical outsider. 

Interestingly, and what’s more coincidental with the commercialization of Dutch Design, a new ambition for design was formulated, once again prompted by the role of government: the idea of design as a response to social issues. Design morphed into ‘design thinking’. In that transition from Dutch Design Then to Design Now, Studio Makkink/Bey, with its complement of assistants, freelancers and trainees alongside the two main players, constitutes a point of reference. 

To repeat, Dutch Design Then was a product of the globalization of the design industry and the introduction of public funding, such as project and presentation grants for the designer. It began with a reconsideration of the interior and consumer articles and culminated in a contextual approach whereby, for example, an object’s functionality was de-emphasized in favour of its communicative power. Studio Makkink/Bey is one of the very few offices that did not so much exchange these principles from the early years as transform them into a speculative practice that revolves around the designer as researcher and new forms of representation and mediation are sought for each project. Whether acting on their own initiative or, more rarely, at the behest of someone else, they see design as encompassing both the design of an educational system and responding to issues related to a rural area in a state of transition. In the context of Makkink/Bey’s work practice, the research model – scale model, prototype or workshop – is simultaneously a design product and in turn the starting point for a new question, while the exhibition is not a survey of finished products, but a research instrument still working towards a possible solution. Within the domain of Design Now, Makkink/Bey is not alone in embracing such a work practice, but as the heir of the idea of Dutch Design Then, it is one of the few offices in which the evolution from then to now and the advent of a more research-oriented approach to design is evident.

Meanwhile, this office’s work practice is also having a big influence on design education. Bey is director of the Sandberg Instituut and Makkink teaches at several academies and universities. At the same time, their product has moved further and further away from what the general public recognizes as design and their projects are becoming increasingly ephemeral, not just because of the time-specific and performative nature of their products, such as the lecture, the workshop or the presentation, but also because of their tendency to materialize their research proposals and images in Styrofoam, as well as their repeated use of the maquette and the model – as if they are at pains to emphasize the speculative, still evolving, nature of their proposals. This is not a case of undue modesty, however, but an expression of a broader interpretation of the role of design, one in which the social significance and speculative capacity of design is paramount.

Let us pause to consider this most recent in a series of transformations from Dutch Design Then to Design Now. Thanks to public funds, the designer was able to develop into an ‘auteur’, which subsequently, courtesy of the repositioning of Dutch Design Then, led to the commercialization and thus the success of a few star designers. At the same time, this notion of Dutch Design Then has also given rise to a new practice in which the role of the designer is more important than their persona, leading to a more socially engaged practice like that of Makkink/Bey. Interestingly enough, this type of practice is predicated not on a consumer, but once again on a private or public client, while the final form of the end project or product is the outcome of interaction between designer and user rather than the imprimatur of the auteur. The market for luxury interior products is consequently no longer the appropriate place for this Design Now approach and stance, and as such it is also clear that the general consumer is no longer the sole market for Design Now products. If this second outgrowth of Dutch Design of the 1990s is to be turned to good account, if it is to be ‘monetized’, it must first be recognized as a design practice that is both relevant and socially engaged and the result of the interplay between market and government, between private and public, between culture and economy.

In hindsight we piece together the whys and wherefores, governed by cause and effect, and we construct an edifice of motives, which in turn invests everything with a certain logic. Studio Makkink/Bey is that edifice, is that retrospectively formulated outcome of a development that started sometime in the early 1990s and now, almost 30 years later, provides the argumentation for a different, relatively unfamiliar design form which, although associated with a Dutch context, is no longer related to an idea of ‘Dutchness’. Despite their social and cultural success, economic success continues to elude them, precisely because a hybrid work practice also presupposes a hybrid client, market and user (in the form of a community, for example). It is possible that the last of these can only be created by breathing new life into that old collective project – this time based on alternative forms of communality – with the help of newly formulated platforms within different and probably more diverse contexts. Until that moment, long live the philosophy and ambition of Studio Makkink/Bey!