A New Era for Kazerne
TLmag spoke with Annemoon Geurts, Founder and Creative Director of Kazerne, during Dutch Design Week 2024, about the future of her multifaceted business and how nature-inclusive design is the way forward.
What started off as a fun, DIY design exhibition during Dutch Design Week in 2006, slowly yet steadily transformed into one of Eindhoven’s leading cultural hubs and local design destinations. Annemoon Geurts graduated in 1995 from the Design Academy Eindhoven with a degree in their Man and Identity department. She started her own company early on, working with clients on branding, graphic design and communication-focused projects, “but I think I am a better organizer than designer,” she says. What’s more correct to say, perhaps, is that Geurts had a natural instinct to make things happen. Along with some friends, she and her husband, Koen, who is a co-founder Kazerne, were putting on temporary exhibitions during Dutch Design Week, finding venues and having fun, but at a certain point she questioned why it was that there were only innovative or experimental exhibitions for one week of the year and not throughout the year, especially as Eindhoven is known as a design city. “There are a lot of companies, designers and schools in this city doing interesting projects, but most if it is happening behind closed doors. We found it important to open this up. There are still so many people unaware of the impact of design and the range of design in this city – from independent designers such as Kiki and Joost to systematic design. All of this adds up to the transformation of a city and a community,” Geurts explains.
After nearly five years of creating exhibitions and events, in 2012, the city proposed the use of Kazerne, a 2,600 square-metre former barracks built in 1825 and a 100-year old warehouse once used by the city cleaning department. Two years later, in 2014, they acquired the money and support to renovate part of the space, opening up the restaurant and the big exhibition hall. In 2019, they renovated another monumental part of the building to open an 8-room hotel, with the entire property now including the hotel, two-restaurants, meeting spaces, a member’s club, a massive exhibition space, a design lab, as well as offering talks and an annual design award to a young designer. Then, Covid hit. They survived this setback but, as Geurts notes, “last year we decided that it was time to have someone else take over the restaurant and hotel. It needs a new entrepreneur with new energy in the hospitality part. We had Kazerne for 10 years, so we did something right, but it was time for a change.” Now, Kazerne will be two separate entities: The Kazerne Foundation, which is a non-profit that depends on grants and subsidies, and the hospitality entity that will continue to evolve independently. They are working apart but still symbiotically as they are in the same space. Geurts had been wanting to focus more of her time on curating and design and less on staff and hotel concerns so this new era is a welcome change: “Our main goal is to create new opportunities for designers and to show visitors what the added value of design is and now we can fully focus on that.”
The Kazerne Foundation will have two rotating exhibitions throughout the year, curated by Geurts and her team, as well as by outside curators, a weekly innovation café where they connect creativity and tech together and feature a weekly guest speaker. “We now have funds for the next four years to focus programming around nature inclusive design. I feel a need to create appealing examples that are useful and can inspire people to act and think differently,” she explains. Part of this new direction will include a development table with ten people: a student, a young designer and an experienced designer along with seven other people from different sectors, coming together on a regular basis to talk about ideas. There is design thinking, but Geurts like to talk about design doing. What it can do to make actual change. “By letting people create together we hope that people understand this better and come up with examples – A lot of young designers think that they can create impact on the world, but it’s usually so small and narrow. To create a real impact, you have to start somewhere and scale up and that is what I want to stimulate.” The results of the 2025 table will be presented at Dutch Design Week 2025.
The exhibition programming for DDW 2024, which contines to be on view through spring 2025, touched on this nature-inclusive design approach. “Human = Non-Human” is an exhibition that explored the boundaries between what is real and not. “Back to the Flax,” is an exhibition featuring young designers who are looking at the potential of this material in new ways, and “Roots,” in partnership with the Roots Foundation, features work that explores and examines Dutch soil – from the earth to the organisms living within it.
Geurts says about Kazerne’s future: “We are not afraid of failure. The idea is to push forward the possibilities.” An ambitious challenge with exciting possibilities.
All photos courtesy of Kazerne.