‘Welcome to the world of Petra Blaisse’ is the message radiated by this first retrospective book from landscaping and interior design agency Inside Outside, which she founded in 1991. The agency has gathered international fame by mixing architecture and nature, as in Riga Port City and ‘architectural’ curtains for such as Rotterdam’s Kunsthal and the Casa da Música in Oporto, Portugal.
The sense of being introduced to a special way of dealing with architecture and space is reinforced by Irma Boom’s design. For example, look at the long, long sentence by way of introduction that starts on the cover and takes you with it into the story and the intention underlying the book. It is set over an image of dancing ‘blue’ grass and proceeds on its way over the bright green endpapers, a black flower, a yellow tulip hanging from the top edge of the page, a piece of tree bark and a mistily blue bit of sky that could equally be a waterfall. Along with other Boom trademarks such as the use of the fore-edge and the massive typography in combination with bled-off full-colour photographs, this affectionate approach to language and images gives the book a monumental strength.
