The history of the (prison-like) peat colonies of Veenhuizen lead us to design a ‘Cabinet of Stories’. The cabin can be either fully opened or fully closed. While closed, the visitor is confronted with a continuous wall of cabinets, its shelves are filled with reading and learning materials: atlasses, globes, measurement instruments, objects from the science that forms the basis fo the rational design of Veenhuizen. Bicycle routes through nature, stories about inhabitants of the colonies, photo albums about the landscape, information about the Fochteloër Veen. Between the informative pieces there are also more mysterious items: old children’s books, calendars and schemes from the lives of the unfree colonists.
By opening the shell of the cabin, this soft informative environment can be directly confronted with the outdoors. The visitor is suddenly completely surrounded by nature, far from home, out in the open. Nature forces to slow down. There is time for a moment of reflection on the history of the orthogonal farmlands, and on the lives of the colonists who created these.
