Ontwerpen voor een monumentale bank te Haarlem c. 1930

Curator: Immediately, I think… fragmented. A puzzle in its own right. Editor: Indeed! What strikes you most about this sketchbook page, "Ontwerpen voor een monumentale bank te Haarlem," dating to around 1930 by Carel Adolph Lion Cachet, currently residing in the Rijksmuseum? The piece appears to be composed of both pencil and ink drawings on paper. Curator: The raw, almost desperate quality of the linework, like a memory sketched mid-recollection. These benches or platforms or... whatever they are... feel imposing yet provisional, haunted even. It reminds me of a deconstructed stage set. Editor: Your feeling of haunting echoes throughout modernist architectural renderings, where negative space speaks loudly. I read those sharp geometric lines as signals towards progressivist ideals--monumental forms symbolizing new social orders through simplified designs. Think of Bauhaus or De Stijl! These sketches become less about "benches" literally but representational "places" of power or community. What do such spaces tell society? Curator: Power, perhaps…or maybe failed promises thereof. There’s something sterile in its envisioned grandeur, as if human touch will ultimately only degrade its crisp initial state. But more personally…the incomplete nature sparks imagination. Did these benches actually come to fruition, or were these fantasies confined simply here to a page? The unknown is evocative! Editor: And perhaps its real importance lies in the questions and discussions it inspires. Lion Cachet may or may not be widely celebrated today, but pieces such as this reveal an artistic yearning--an impulse toward crafting environments that influence thought through function & aesthetics hand in hand. It really does beg deeper conversation though. Curator: Exactly. Beyond just observing design, this becomes about reading traces of aspiration. Now THAT shifts something for me - seeing echoes rather than artifacts and, thus expanding beyond just present reality. Editor: Yes... leaving a feeling for futurity perhaps unrealized? We stand reflecting back towards ourselves... both through design choices of bygone visions toward the very ground it might occupy. How extraordinary...