Kossmann.dejong wins international design awards in London and Chicago

The exhibition The Laurence church: a monument filled with stories has received two awards in the categories Museum or Exhibition Space and Public Space at the FX International Interior Design Awards in London.

The International Interior Design Association in Chicago, which organises the IIDA Global Excellence Awards, announced that The Laurence church Rotterdam has received an honourable mention. Winning these awards highlights that content and narrative are ever more appreciated in the world of interior design. The FX awards are prestigious international interior design awards, which are handed out in London annually. This year the organisation received over 600 submissions from across the globe while over 1200 guests attended the award ceremony. What is special is that the Laurence church is the only submission that received awards in two different categories. The prizes were awarded by two different juries, which were unanimous in their enthusiasm. The IIDA Global Excellence Awards is an annual global interior design competition organised by the International Interior Design Association in Chicago. It was announced last week that the Laurenskerk was awarded an honourable mention in the category Cultural/Institutional/Educational.

The Laurence church: a monument filled with stories
The Laurence church: a monument filled with stories is a unique exhibition in a unique location. It contains stories about the past and the present, life and death, the city´s bombing and rebuild, and also its quietness. The exhibition draws on five centuries of history. The permanent display is not a traditional exhibition, because there is no collection to present. The stories are told via multi-perspective multimedia means instead. They are stories that make connections between the secular and the religious and that involve visitors both emotionally and intellectually. The chapels play the lead and each tells its own story. The display has added a new narrative layer to the architecture of the church. By allowing the walls to speak, the building has been transformed into the exhibition´s carrier. Therefore it hasn´t become a spatial installation, but the space itself has become the exhibition. Kossmann.dejong has realised the Laurence church´s makeover without making any significant interventions in the structure, but returning its history to the building. The new layout therefore makes a significant contribution to the discourse about reuse and refurbishment of religious buildings in particular.

About Kossmann.dejong
Kossmann.dejong, exhibition architects, is an Amsterdam-based design agency that focuses on exhibition and interior architecture. The company was founded in 1998 by Herman Kossmann (1958) and Mark de Jong (1960). Both are architecture graduates from the Technical University Delft. Since its inception, the agency has grown to include over 20 employees. A connection between content and imagination is what characterises Kossmann.dejong’s design approach. It manages to do this while making complex design issues accessible to a broad audience and to transform them into intrinsic experiences. The agency combines a range of disciplines and media that enable it to tell spatial stories. Film, lighting and sound are indispensable media in generating experiences. The subjects of its exhibition designs vary from architecture, to children´s books, and from history to psychiatry, art for teenagers and microorganisms. Recent projects include The Darkroom, the first permanent presentation on Dutch photographic history – in the form of an interactive darkroom – for the Netherlands Photo Museum in Rotterdam, and Death Matters, an exhibition about rituals surrounding death in the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam.