DAAN STEINHAUS

I still remember myself being a young boy. One that could spend hours playing around with his dad’s Dinky-toys. I used to place my head as close to the ground as possible and watched how light and shadow played along when I slowly moved the cars around. This affection for objects that move never left me, and I visited countless car gatherings, classic races, air-shows and gallery’s to feed my love for shapes and their story’s. In the end I always wanted to become a hero like Stirling Moss or Donald Campbell, but money and my moment in time worked against me, so I decided to study the art and design of their vehicles.

 

The Design Academy in Eindhoven (Netherlands) offered me the perfect opportunity and soon I was surrounded by fellow design enthusiasts. But I felt a bit different, since most of the students were focussed on nothing but the future, and I was still thinking about my heroes from the past. This was confusing in the beginning but I learned step by step about the differences in shape, identity, material and their relation to people.  I also realized that I could not copy the past but I had to translate and keep the essence alive. This principle of translating classic’s to a modern context was the start of my identity as a designer. 

 

Now I create new objects with the romance of the past. My objects are never completely finished but they function as a blueprint that focusses on the feeling and identity of the object. I prefer to see it as poetry that triggers the mind and inspires the future generation