Groningen Museum
Client Frans Haks, director of the museum at the time, and architect and designer Alessandro Mendini created a true monument of postmodernism in the water of the connecting canal on the edge of downtown Groningen. Decoration is abundantly present in the part designed by Mendini himself in the form of the pattern applied to the façade (Philippe Starck and Coop Himmelb(l)au also adopted museum parts). This pattern is a reference to the decoration of Mendini's most famous armchair design, the Proust Armchair from 1978, where the decoration is based on an enlargement of a pointillist painting by Paul Signac. (There is little better proof that in postmodernism originality is hidden in intelligence, thus referencing the past).
When the museum was built in the early 90s, this pattern was photographically printed on laminate. Exposure to sunlight had since caused this print to be almost completely shot.
For the recent renovation of the museum building, therefore, a colour-fast alternative was chosen, made of ceramic tiles, which AGROB BUCHTAL produced together with Koninklijke Tichelaar in Makkum. Tichelaar is a well-known Dutch company that not only produces special decorative stoneware, often in cooperation with outstanding artists and designers, but is also involved in all kinds of building projects. In this case, the Signac pattern by Alessandro Mendini, the leading architect of the museum building, was translated into a glaze screen print on large-format tiles (KerAion system) with a maximum dimension of 1.28 x 1.28 m, manufactured by AGROB BUCHTAL. Thus, the Signac pattern has once again undergone a metamorphosis.
