Introducing Studio Public Private
Roodnat graduated Cum Laude in 1999 and gained wide attention with his final project, the Suitchair – a chair made from fabric and filled with foam to make it solid. He quickly went on to found his studio KapteinRoodnat in Amsterdam with partner Marleen Kaptein, through which he works in diverse areas of design, from furniture and products to architecture and installations. He is also director of design brand Label/Breed.
As head of the BA studio Public Private, he helps students explore the tensions, intersections and possibilities within public and personal spaces. His approach to education is rooted in care – a sense of wanting to help others find their way – and in his own experience, both of studying and working in design.
Anna Winston, chief editor of the DAE website, spoke to Roodnat about his long history with DAE and how it continues to shape his approach to teaching.
→Anna Winston: Can you tell me a bit about how you ended up studying at DAE?
Stijn Roodnat: I’m super dyslexic and so schoolwork was always a big problem. I quit at an early age and travelled – I went to Australia for eight months when I was 15 – and then I was 16 and I had to do something. I worked for a company who were renovating classical villas in Den Haag, but it was not something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So I started my own construction company.
After two and a half years, it was going really well, but I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do forever. I asked Bruno Ninaber van Eyben, who designed the Dutch coins, if I could work for him for free for three months to see what the design profession was like. Then I found Eindhoven and applied. It was a totally new life for me: meeting people my own age with the same interest, having a lot of fun but also making a lot of beautiful work. The practical part for me was quite easy. In some moments, early on, that saved me. But I wanted to go more in-depth and more conceptual, so I worked hard on that.
→AW: Your graduation project won quite a lot of attention. How did you go on to launch your studio?
SR: Directly after graduating, I got a big assignment from the then head of [Man and] Living department, Gijs Bakker. Droog Design was developing a new pilot Mandarina Duck store in Paris with NL Architects. The concept was for the architecture to be really basic and then the whole collection had to be on these objects. But they were architects, not object-makers. So Gijs Bakker made the link to me. That was a huge task, making all these objects for the store. I had to start my own company right away for the contracts.
→AW: What drew you back to start teaching?
SR: They asked, and I have always had difficulty saying no! But I also really enjoyed my study at the Academy, and I was quite handy – I learned that I loved to work with other students and help other people make their ideas come through.
When I started teaching, there were a lot of students that were older than me. I started in 2001, so I had only graduated for two years, and then started teaching at [the former BA department Man and] Leisure. It was interesting for me because I was flying around, seeing different studios, seeing their working methods – I moved from Leisure to [Man and] Wellbeing, then to [Man and] Living with Bas van Tol. He left, and I took over as head of department.
→AW: Do you find that being in contact with students gives your own work more energy?
SR: Absolutely. If you’re young and you’re at DAE, you tend to have big dreams, and I like to help make some of those come true. It’s like you’re giving a gift, but you get a lot back. It gives you access to different perspectives. If you’re just in the professional world, you can develop a kind of tunnel vision, so it’s important to have people around with crazy ideas.
→AW: Why is your BA studio at DAE called Public Private?
SR: In the past, DAE had two different departments; one was Man and Living and the other was about Public Space. When Thomas [Widdershoven] was still the director, they decided to combine them into one department. I suggested calling it Public Private, because this is a super interesting working area: it’s a very important topic – how we organise society in terms of what is owned by who, what is public and what is shared, what you own privately, and how you want to deal with that in relation to creating your identity.
“If you want to change the future you have to work with different industries and experts”
→AW: What should a student expect if they sign up to be part of Studio Public Private?
SR: To learn to understand your own qualities. It’s very important to collaborate with different kinds of experts in different fields, but you can only really do that when you understand where you stand and what your own qualities are. So we try to organise our assignments so that students can explore themselves in a personal way.
If you want to change the future, you also have to work together with different industries and experts, especially from outside of the design field. With this approach, you can create new ways of dealing with things. We briefly changed the name to Collaborative Solutions [when the new BA Studio system started], but it was too open to interpretation, so we switched back.
I think it’s pretty well balanced, and that has been helped by our own experiences of studying at DAE. I was always a bit surprised that students would try to keep ideas to themselves, living in their own working reality, and were scared of other people taking their ideas. But if you believe in yourself and understand yourself, you can find the right people to have around you to share your dreams and ideas with, and you come to a much higher level. I find joy in seeing opportunities to bring people together and help them to grow.
→AW: Can you give me an example?
SR: A little while ago we did an assignment with Samir Bantal, director of AMO, and Wageningen University for the Countryside exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York [directed by Rem Koolhaas and Bantal]. Having all these people around the table, with university professors next to students, created a really interesting new conversation. In a positive way, people are surprised about how designers think and reach solutions and the other way around.
A recent graduate project that is a good example is Jelle Seegers’ Solar Metal Smelter [a huge magnifying glass that melts metal]. It’s not just about the machine, it’s the way he thinks about bringing things together, finding a new working method, and a kind of season-based working rhythm. It has a lot of layers, and then he makes it happen in a joyful way. Or If a tree falls… by Lewis Duckworth who found that there was an opportunity to create a community-based system of reuse from damaged public trees in London. He can make a lot of different things from these trees, but it was more about bringing people together and celebrating nature in the city.
