Thema

Design your look, design your life. Rambler Studios is a creative platform for raw talent. It offers young people a safe space where they can discover what they’re good at and find a sense of belonging – and maybe a career in street fashion.

Started by Carmen van der Vecht in Amsterdam in 2010, Rambler Studios has branched out to New York’s Lower East Side. It operates there under the wings of the Henry Street Settlement, a philanthropic institution dating back to the late 1800’s. In the same basement in a social housing project where he himself learned to sew, fashion coach Andres Biel helps kids create and realize their own ideas – “with some help from TikTok!”. On both sides of the Atlantic, the young people in the program say: “The most important thing I’m getting here are life skills.”

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‘From the Streets to the Heart’ is the second episode of my Future 400 podcast. It looks at work by Dutch and American photographers who are part of the annual international photo festival Photoville in Lower Manhattan. “Even though they are an Atlantic apart, there is a shared sensibility here.”

Dutch photographer Ernst Coppejans delves deep into the lives of LGBTQIA+ people living on the streets in New York. Kennedi Carter, a young Black photographer from the South, dresses people of color in a combination of her own imagining, of garb from colonial times and contemporary streetwear.

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This is the first episode of Future 400, a four-part podcast series marking the moment that the Dutch set foot on Manhattan 400 years ago: ‘New York Before New York’. We start by looking at New York before it was New York, hearing the voices of the people who already lived there: the Lenape.

When the Dutch colonists set foot on the island of Manhattan, four hundred years ago, there were already people living there: the Lenape. Historian Russell Shorto curated an exhibition for the New York Historical Society to tell the other stories about the town of New Amsterdam – and invited the Lenape to react with a powerful letter to an Unknown Ancestor. And Pauline Toole, New York’s Commissioner of Records, tells us about the wonderful stories of real live people of many faiths and nationalities living in New Amsterdam that can be found in the city’s 17th century archives. 

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De cultuurvloggers van Shot of Culture maakten deze superleuke video over Waterwijs, de tentoonstelling die ik als gastcurator heb samengesteld voor het buitenmuseum van het Zuiderzeemuseum.

Al in 2010 begon de gemeente Den Bosch met nadenken over vervanging van het theater aan het plein De Parade. Nu is het er, in een mix van moderne en historische stijlen en materialen.

In de jaren tachtig en negentig van de vorige eeuw werden er jaarlijks 200 miljoen kerstkaarten in Nederland verstuurd. Dit waren de gloriejaren van de kersttraditie. Een fenomeen dat de Britse architecte Alison Smithson ook begeesterde.

Aan de fraaie Apollolaan in Amsterdam-Zuid heeft de afwerende J.P. Morganbank van Wim Quist plaatsgemaakt voor een nieuw kantoorgebouw ontworpen door OMA.

It is climate change that is sucking the Colorado River dry, or the fact that too many people have too many straws in its water? Actually it’s both, we learned during our yearly Harvard GSD Loeb Fellowship study trip that went to Denver, Colorado this year. So yes this is a big story. I touched on some of the pertinent issues in this article for the Loeb Fellowship website (pdf and images below).