This is the artwork on the front cover of Taboo. It's a linocut made by Raven van der Steen, we hand printed it in black and later coloured it digitally. To accompany this artwork, Raven asked her friend Anne to write a poem that explores the symbology of Taboo hidden within in the linocut.
And then we whispered.
Was it fear? Was it fire?
Closing the eyes and shutting down.
Refuse to use, refuse to drown.
We are triggered,
Withdrawn in the waiting room.
Flooded with the silence,
Unspoken, imbalanced.
Here are misunderstandings,
Words without endings.
Stirred up, swallowed,
Skewed looks, walls narrowed.
Whereas the windows still open,
Not meant for only staring.
Blame it on us, shame on you,
Ascend through and shatter,
Taboo.
Raven and Anne are both doing their master in Urbanism at the faculty. Follow them at @raravenen and @anne_van_den_berg on Instagram. Want to design a future cover of Bnieuws? Contact us!
This story begins in Zaandam. I went there to visit the Inntel Hotel, a building that I find to be hilarious. Its façade consists of a bunch of traditional wooden houses stacked on top of each other in the least traditional of arrangements. The comical effect was even stronger as I considered how architects usually despise humour in architecture. While standing in front of it, I couldn’t help but ask: what was going through the mind of the architect?
I went to Wilfried van Winden, the author of this colossus, to try get an answer to this and other questions I had about his work.
If there is a type of space that we could easily call resilient, that is the cinema.
This is a Bnieuws article, and you are reading it. I wrote this article because I’m being paid to and because I have obligations to the editorial board to do so; because it’s my job. The world is not often discussed in this way, because it’s not usually a very comforting outlook on the world. It can at times, as shown in my opening sentences, bleed the colours out of everything even remotely interesting. This article aims to do exactly this: ‘call architecture like it is’. But is architecture a defined thing- or can it be what you want to make of it?
