Marijn van der Poll

Picture the scene: the flat heavily villaged countryside surrounding Eindhoven in the Netherlands, criss-crossed by roads and canals, peopled by sober Netherlanders going about their village business one bright, chilly day.....
Then superimpose on to this everyday scene one huge white brick travelling down the road with two giggling heads poking out from a square well cut out of the centre.It moves like a car and has wheels and a steering wheel, but there's none of the usual signifiers; no windscreen, doors, bonnet or boot.There's just this minimal geometric block, as crisp cornered as a block of lego, the size of a stretch limo, riding the roads as if it were a regular vehicle instead of this bizarre cartoon cuboid.I am surprised we didn't cause an accident.It was all in aid of science, though.Well, perhaps not science exactly,more proof of a hypothesis.Its Dutch designer, Marijn van der Poll, just wanted to show me that this thing worked- it wasn't some student flight of fancy.His concept is the modular car- an automobile that you can design yourself.There's a number of idea's bound up in it- a significant one being the fact that people forge such strong personal relationships with their vehi cle, yet in reality there are so few ways of personalising it."Its the ultimate status symbol.Even if you didn't have strong feelings about your car, others base their impressions of you on the car that you drive,"says van der Poll,"But there are so few ways you can influence its shape, bar adding new bumpers or chrome wheels".Van der Poll's solution was to provide a blank canvas of a car, with the fundamentals of chassis, engine and the rest simply surrounded by a cube of polyurethane foam(the same material used for surfboards).The idea is simply DIY bodywork.People have to go at the cube with a saw and a piece of sandpaper to attain their desired shape, then take it to a body-shop to be laminated in glassfibre and polyester resin.

een gedeelte uit -CARVING A NICE- door Katy Greaves voor Blueprint magazine(apr 2003)