Blaisse is not a typical designer and applied Arts is hardly a conventional monograph. The book traces the development of her unique practice from its beginnings to its current form. Her first freelance design projects for exhibitions, interiors and gardens began in 1986 and were commissions that followed nearly a decade of work as an exhibition designer for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Inside Outside did not come into being until five years later, when she registered her studio with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce. At the time, she was still working alone, transporting her archives in the back seat of her car, she recalled. The projects are organized in reverse chronological order, a structure that turns reading forward into an experience of digging into the past. The most recent work appears at the front of the book – the 2022 exhibition Inside Outside/Petra Blaisse: A Retrospectiveat the MAXXI in Rome – while the earliest collaboration is at the very end: the Netherlands Dance Theater, Blaisse’s earliest work with Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). In the period marked by these two milestones, hundreds of projects were completed, and many of them are captured in this volume. Despite the panoramic scope of the book, collaboration in general and with OMA in particular forms a clear common thread.
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