Reality Machines features work by young contemporary Dutch architects, industrial designers, fashion designers, graphic designers and photographers. Provocative, experimental, conceptual, fresh, dry, minimalist, brazen, even blunt; these were adjectives used to describe the work of those Dutch designers and artists in the 1990s. This work was a runaway success both at home and abroad, to the extent of becoming a hype. This book examines the stance adopted by Dutch designers in the 1990s and today. Militating against the ‘makability’ of a fully designed landscape, they deliberately seek to distort and alineate reality. Five themed groups – PhotoShop Reality, Reinventing the Archetype, Come Back Effect, Infinite Artifice, Is this for real? – pull the various disciplines into confrontation. An introductory article by Pauline Terreehorst charts the state of play within those disciplines; this in response to the question of how the Dutch design world will shape up in a future marked by changed economic and political circumstances. Largely given over to illustrations, the book includes work by architects (West 8, MVRDV, NL Architects, One Architecture), industrial designers (Hella Jongerius, Arnout Visser, Jurgen Bey, Marcel Wanders, Richard Hutten), fashion designers (Alexander van Slobbe, Saskia van Drimmelen, Pascale Gatzen, Aziz Bekkaoui, Niels Klavers), graphic designers (Jop van Bennekom, Daniël van der Velden & Maureen Mooren, Thonik) and photographers (Anuschka Blommers & Niels Schumm, Vivianne Sassen).

Reality Machines
Mirroring the Everyday in Contemporary Dutch Architecture, Photography and Design