CAC Reading Room opened

  • 2009-05-21
  • By Adam Mullett

The Contemporary Art Center is the perfect escape for the artistically inclined.

VILNIUS - Vilnius suffers from a lack of things to do if you exclude eating, getting drunk or walking aimlessly around the Old Town 's especially if you are looking for something free to do.
The Contemporary Art Center (CAC), however, has given residents somewhere to go where they can relax and learn about art in the new Reading Room, opened on May 19.

The Reading Room is a small reference library where people can go during the day to learn about art from around the world.
Other than the plethora of books, which are due to expand in numbers, the most striking thing about the library is its design.
Oddly shaped tables and hand-embroidered chairs punctuate the all-white interior. The tables are cut out shapes from a larger map, which can be put together to make a larger working space when required.

Each table has numbers in its vertexes and can be used to match tables together, much like Dominos, which when combined make one large rectangle. The map to put all the tables together again is drawn on the wall.

A Dutch design team designed the room after they won the competition for the best concept idea.
"It was designed by a Dutch team who won the tender written by the CAC. The design was sponsored by the Mondriaan [Stichting] foundation, which supports artists who are exhibiting or doing work abroad. It was about 16,000 euros. I like the design very much 's I like that it is very light and very white and attracts a lot of light. It is really Dutch 's it is a great example of modern Dutch design with very sober lines," Dutch ambassador Annemieke Ruigrok told TBT.

"What I really like are the chairs. The chairs were brought here and the team went to the arts academy to the textile design and one of the Dutch team drilled small holes and then the students embroidered them," she added.
One of the three designers, Bart Guldemond, said that the space is not intended to look good, but be functional.

"The main idea is that you can change the space 's as you can see with the tables, you can put them together and it can be a right angle, but in the use of the space, you can change its form. People that work with it can make their own set up," he told TBT.
Everything except the lamps were constructed in Lithuania.

"The idea of the lamps is that they can disappear in the ceiling and go away. If you change the tables, which can move, it's important to find a light system that adjusts to individual set ups 's that's why they can move up and down. You can move it up and down to make a more intimate light," Guldemond said about the overhead lamps, which can be mere centimeters away from the table, when required.

The team of artists looked for a design that would add something to the CAC.
"The white was a reaction to the architecture of the building. We wanted to add something that reacts to the building. Not something that has a dominant atmosphere, but something that is in line with the function of the room. It has an openness that makes it ready to be used 's open to use, open to fill in, open to bring extra information layers and so on."