By Gabrielle Kennedy / 02-05-2009

Lok Jansen, son of famed Dutch shoe designer Jan Jansen, grew up in the sort of left-wing intellectual environment that tends to nurture free-thinking, and that very anti-bourgeois sense of nonchalance about the future.

“My parents always lived in the Jordaan and they got sick of the cramped space and no central heating,” Jansen explains.  “So they decided to move to the Bijlmer.”

That was early in the Bijlmer development scheme when the design was supposed to be about 1960s idealism and the associated lifestyle.  It wasn’t until 1974 that the neighbourhood faced difficulties with a sudden influx of immigration and budget cuts.

“My parents didn’t even look at the apartment before they bought it,” Jansen says.  “My dad got the idea, looked at the plans, and asked for the key.  When the neighbourhood started to change, we just stayed.  We loved the green, the absence of cars, the multicultural environment and the sense of community.   I went to the local school and I think I was the only white kid at kindergarten.  Now, I am probably the only architect to ever be born and raised in the Bijlmer.”

Jansen’s was a childhood surrounded by design and design ideas none of which struck him as being particularly important. “I never really connected with any of it,” he says, “except maybe with my father’s shoes, which I was always intrigued by; and I always liked Swip Stolk and our Gustave Asselbergs paintings.

“But I was always drawing,” Jansen continues.  “In my bedroom all my walls and my ceiling were covered in my drawings.  When we drove to my father’s factory in Italy, I’d sit in the back and draw pictures on the seat behind his head.”

After an architecture degree from Delft and a Master’s degree from Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan, Jansen worked for SeARCH, an architectural studio in Holland where he decided that he didn’t really want to be an architect.  “I was drawing a lot for the concept and design phase and for competitions,” he says.  “It was interesting, but it wasn't the sort of drawing I really needed to do so I'd come home and spend all night working on my own stuff.”

Quitting and in Japan he instead started to focus more on illustration and thinking about how he could incorporate it into his existing skills. He started with some exhibition and store-design jobs for his father, then, in 2004, he landed a big group job for the AMO, which he jokingly describes as the research and propaganda arm of OMA.

The Netherlands, which in 2004 was chairing the EU, asked the AMO to create an exhibition about the history of Europe.  The OMA selected artists who put togetehr a 62 meter panorama that depicted important moments in European history.  “But we chose to visualize and interpret the events through art by drawing each episode in the corresponding movement that flourished at the time,” Jansen says.  

“That was the first time that my work was the actual finished thing,” he continues. “I didn’t have to wait five years for an idea to be realized.  It was immediate.”

Still based in Japan and married to a Japanese woman, Jansen now illustrates for Prada look-books and is more focused than ever on exploring the limits, both artistic and functional, of illustration. Most recently he was in Amsterdam to participate in the Ultra de la Rue event, which was part of the celebrations marking 400 years of friendship between New York and Amsterdam.

“I call what I do spatial illustration,” Jansen says of his goals.  “It's an installation with a function. I don’t approach design as an architect, but as an artist, which allows me a lot of freedom to keep everything personal.”

As well as two of his father’s stores in Holland, Jansen has designed the Maison Inoui store in Japan.  The store looks more like a gallery than a fashion boutique with its rough sketched interiors and high-end select products displayed alongside rotating and seasonal artworks.  “I designed the space so that people could come in and experience the shop like they might a gallery,” he says.

For Prada, Jansen has teamed up with Jeroen Koolhaas and together they file through thousands of backstage and behind-the-scenes fashion photographs to re-interpret the season’s concept. “We are paid to visually explore and widen those concepts,” he explains.

Jansen’s work in Japan, however, is mostly geared towards international clients and the magazine industry, in particular, is something he tries to avoid. “There is definitely interesting work out there, but I’d say that 80% of art direction in Japan favours that whimsical, pastel, child-like style,” he says.  “It’s not that I don’t like that style, but I don’t like it how art directors pursue it as the only option.  I’m looking for more freedom than that because I think the industry really needs people with more vision who are willing to take risks.”

Next for Jansen is a design installation at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, which he will once again team up with Koolhaas for.  “It is again about combining the idea of an installation with function,” he says.  The plan is to design two rooms of the museum into a classical dinner-party setting.  “If all goes well, we will make it all out of slightly larger-then-life drawings and then make 3d cut outs.”

The result, Jansen hopes, is a step towards the realization of his fused interest – architecture, illustration and art.

The exhibition will open in September.

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