Notes on "Brick: the Exhibition"

The European Ceramic Workcenter (.ekwc) in the Netherlands regards itself as an international workshop facility and provides designers, artists and architects with the opportunity to carry out technical and artistic experiments using ceramics and tiles as materials.
.ekwc operates an artist-in-residence programme and enables 45 participants to experiment with these materials under specialist supervision. Experts support participants at the technological level and help them to turn their design ideas into reality.

Participants are selected annually on the basis of a public application, a competition for art graduates, or by invitation. More information is available at www.ekwc.nl.
In the exhibition which has ended recently, "Brick: the Exhibition", the results of such a workshop are on display. Sixteen international participants from the fields of architecture, design and art had set themselves the aim of developing a new type of brick.

The exhibition at the Stijilinstitute in Rotterdam showed full scale materials and prototypes with a range of modular structures. The traditional ceramic skin of buildings is interpreted in a novel way and revived by formal experiments and new functions.