For the renovated Holland Boulevard at Schiphol Airport, Samira Boon designed a large-scale acoustic artwork inspired by a photograph of a vast Dutch polder landscape. The title, 10.800 Horizons, refers to the number of yarns she used to make the horizon.
The Holland Boulevard at Schiphol Airport is a lounge for international travellers. The airport commissioned NEXT architects to redesign the waiting area between Lounge 2 and 3. The renewed Holland Boulevard serves as a calling card for the Netherlands. Travellers arriving or departing pass through the waiting area and are introduced to Dutch culture. Travellers with a lot of time can even visit a dependence of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and a library.
To create an intimate atmosphere, the architects asked Samira Boon to design a wandbespanning. Boon took the photo Empty Landscape by Matthieu Verhoeven as the starting point for the design. The typical Dutch landscape is visible from the various small and intimate ‘living rooms’ that NEXT designed. From close up, the landscape falls apart and the passerby discovers textures and compositions of materials. It invites visitors to touch. This is the first time in the history of the airport that textile wallcovering/wandbekleding is allowed. It had to meet all requirements for maintenance and safety.
The wall for which the textile was made is 2.75 metres high and 26 metres long. The number of metres needed to cover the wall was almost 58 metres, woven in 24 sections. Only four different yarns were used for the base of the fabric. The photo of the landscape was translated into abstract structures which from a distance form the landscape.
Boon trained as an architect at TU Delft and spent several years in Japan. There, she became fascinated by the 3D-folded structures in origami. In recent years, she has focused increasingly on innovative textile products and interior applications, with a particular interest in 3D structures. She creates her ‘Super Folds’ designs using Illustrator software. For more complex and irregular folding patterns, she uses a program developed by a Japanese mathematician. Boon has won numerous awards with her innovative textiles, including the Creative Heroes Award in 2017 and the Architizer Award in 2018.
