News
Commission public work of art
Background
Utrecht is a dynamic city. A city seeking a modern way to connect its growing periphery of post-war urban housing developments and suburbs with its historic city centre. On one side of the divide is high-rise shopping mall Hoog Catharijne. Forbidding, monolithic, once thought of as visionary, it towers over the immense railway complex in the heart of Utrecht, the nerve centre of the country’s railway system. On the other side we find the network of cobbled streets and alleyways surrounding the medieval Dom tower and Oudegracht, built on the city’s Roman foundations.
Catharijnesingel is where the distant past, the recent past and the future meet. This former canal around the city walls is now the focus of the large-scale renovation project which is to make Utrecht’s centre ready to accommodate a massive increase in visitor numbers – the number of public transport passengers, for instance, is expected to double from 50 million to 100 million a year by 2030.
On this verge, looking out on the biggest building site in the city’s history and its busiest pedestrian crossing, is the head office of Steenkolen Handels Vereeniging (SHV). The company has been in Utrecht since 1913 and has deep roots there. Until the 1970s, the office building stood alongside the city’s outer canal. The canal was filled to make way for a multi-lane road to open up the city centre to cars. In the years ahead, the building will first face a giant hole, then a sand flat, and eventually, again, water.
Invited competition
The Fentener van Vlissingen Fund supports and promotes artistic and cultural projects in the city and province of Utrecht. The fund was founded in 1961 by SHV, and is financed by this family company with a workforce of over 40,000 employees and activities on four continents. In line with SHV’s corporate philosophy, the fund values and looks for the unusual. With SHV, the fund believes this creates unconventional opportunities for people, as well as room to make mistakes. Providing an environment that is creative rather than bureaucratic, SHV supports people in the development of fresh ideas, to forge an independent path for the future.
To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the fund is commissioning the design of a public work of art with an international appeal, and will be inviting several artists to submit a proposal. To assess these, a jury has been appointed consisting of: T. van Gestel, project leader at the Foundation Art and Public Space, S.B.M. Roozen, project manager for the northern railway station area, E.F.C. van Tuijn, art historian and journalist, web and new media coordinator at Gemeentemuseum in The Hague and M.I.E. van Zijl, head of the design and applied art department at Centraal Museum in Utrecht. The latter two are board members of the Fentener van Vlissingen Fund. Chairman of the jury is Mayor A. Wolfsen of Utrecht.
The work of art is a present to residents and visitors of the city of Utrecht. Its envisaged location is, symbolically, the bridge close to the SHV building on Rijnkade.
