With its design-based aesthetic an intentional homage to West Michigan’s own rich history in the design world, the new hands-on interactive learning and play space inside the
Holland Area Arts Council is clearly not just a kid thing.
Housed in one of the HAAC’s former Holland gallery spaces,
The Studio totals out a cozy 3,530 square feet, effectively affording a sort of miniaturized hands-on children’s museum to the Holland arts community, who because of its theme and more intimate size are also able to take the concept and make it their own.
“West Michigan has such a huge reputation for design, we thought that could not only draw visitors into our state if we talked about hands-on education with design, but would at the same time draw in the manufacturing community to be more invested in our space so that they would be able to profile their industry’s design triumphs,” says Lorma Williams Freestone, executive director of HAAC.
In an old gallery space located at one of the building’s corners, Williams Freestone says The Studio’s new home allows for a much natural light to complement its modern-industrial aesthetic — which, she adds, was more directly influenced by installations specifically crafted by local artists and designers for The Studio’s rotating interior.
“We wanted it to be clean and almost industrial, create a real clean slate with the white walls and the galvanized fixtures, which also gives it a very modern, clean look,” Lorma Williams Freestone says.
The galvanized action, she says, was directly influenced from an artist installation that used palm-sized blocks of found objects to create a massive magnetized texture wall, with magnetic sheets for the galvanized fixtures produced by Zeeland manufacturer K2 Metal.
“We needed a metal wall to put it on, so we had a galvanized sheet wall brought in for us, and that was the jumping off point where we stepped back and said, ‘This is really beautiful and let’s make everything in this space accented with that galvanized metal.’”
Conceptualized back in February 2014, HAAC staff held rounds of strategic planning sessions, visited interactive art spaces from around the country, and engaged a group of local designers , educators, artists, and engineers to create The Studio.
The HAAC building, located at 150 E. 8th St. in Holland, will host different kinds of indoor and outdoor activities for families at The Studio’s June 11 grand opening. Open to the public with no RSVP required, there is a $5 admission fee for the event, which will last from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
For more information about the space, visit
Holland Area Arts Council or
The Studio online or find them
here on Facebook.
Written by Anya Zentmeyer, Development News Editor
Images courtesy of Holland Area Arts Council
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