Dutch Discoveries in New York Harbor

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So far this month, the Kingdom of the Netherlands has loaned a prized Vermeer to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, hosted a sailing race, and even built a new $2.3 million pavilion for the city in Battery Park. For the past two weekends, it has also run "Pioneers of Change," an exhibition devoted to the latest ideas and developments within Dutch design, on Governors Island, which Henry Hudson would have been able to see when he first pulled into New York Harbor in the fall of 1609.

Curated by Renny Ramakers, co-founder and director of the Dutch design company Droog (see their store in SoHo), the show transformed the staid, pale yellow houses on the island — once home to military officers stationed there — into fantastical experiments in design, urban planning, and art that ranged from the bizarre to the sublime, the participatory to the polemical.

"Don’t ditch it, stitch it! Don’t end it, mend it!" read a sign on the wall of one such former abode, dubbed Harlem / Haarlem house for the exhibition (curators adopted for each of the show's spaces after a New York place name that comes from the Dutch). Design collective Platform21 had taken over the space with its "Repair Manifesto" and invited visitors to glue together shattered dishware they'd made available. In another room, directions for creating a version of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43) out of colored tape were there for the taking.

Designers can create more than products, the show emphasized: They can create experiences. The Bowery / Bouwerij house offered the "Tickle Salon," in which volunteers could let a tiny robot that looked like a carpet tassel glide across their bodies, receiving a "body map" as they got a massage. Nearby, the "Go Slow" café lived up to its name. "Elderly people … prepare food … and serve it slowly," a sign promised. The teabags were hand sewn.

As one would hope from an exhibition devoted to design, there were also plenty of things to covet. The ever-fanciful Atelier Van Lieshout provided a gigantic brown skull for children to enjoy on the sprawling lawn, while Christien Meindertsma let visitors see her makeshift studio, where she is using six-foot-long needles to knit a thick woolen carpet.

Happily, after all of these opportunities to learn and look, there was also a place to indulge. Designer Marcel Schmalgemeijer hocked products — all priced under $100, and all Dutch-designed — out of the Staten Island / Staten Eylandt house. One could acquire a set of Experimental Jetset Buzzworks buttons for $6 or splurge on a Marlie Dekkers push-up bra for $99 (marked down from $300). It is not entirely clear what New Yorkers have ever done to earn such remarkable, sustained generosity from the Dutch, but, as they lined up at the cash registers, they certainly seemed to be enjoying it.