„Don’t Stop Thinking!“

The exhibition “Don’t Stop Thinking!” offers insight into the complex work of the architect Joost Meuwissen, inviting and inspiring us to take a different perspective on the everyday things in our cities. Joost Meuwissen was always thinking outside the box, continually lending unexpected importance to the seemingly banal, viewing projects and plans from different vantage points, and endeavoring to give them theoretical legitimacy. Theory and practice as a single entity: “Practice is theory!” To him it was important to “… be able to think about theory in the design process, instead of, as usual, ceasing thought altogether once the drawing begins.”
Over the past 30 years, Joost Meuwissen (1950–2016) was an outstanding and perpetually nonconformist thinker in the fields of architecture and urban planning. His most impressive work—including a remarkable abundance of texts, drawings, projects, lectures, interviews, but also radio broadcasts and television shows—will continue to enrich the space of discourse. His unconventional, poetic, and extremely precise verbalizations are both challenge and provocation for the current state of architectural discourse.
Meuwissen studied architecture in Delft, earned his doctorate in Eindhoven, and worked in Amsterdam as an architect, critic, and also as editor-in-chief of the magazine Wiederhall. His teaching activity took him to various educational institutions in the Netherlands and then to the University of Karlsruhe. As of 1995, he taught at Graz University of Technology after a stop at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
The exhibition “Don’t Stop Thinking!” is a spatial compilation of selected projects, drawings, texts, and film, including never before seen documents from the archive, supplemented by the artwork of the painter Marian Plug, who constantly accompanied the work of Joost Meuwissen.
Special thanks are extended to Marian Plug and Meredith Plug for the loans and also for providing access to the archive.
The video material was made available by Wolfgang Dokonal (TU Graz), Mies TV, and HDA Graz.