Sustainability and art: bike path inspired by Van Gogh

Bike riding is good for your health and for the environment and if you’ve got a bike in Nuenen, a Dutch city connected to Van Gogh, you’re in for a great artistic ride with plenty of visual impact.



Nuenen, the Dutch city where Vincent Van Gogh lived in 1883, honours the famous painter with a new urban attraction: the Van Gogh Roosegaarde Bicycle Path, designed by Daan Roosegaarde and Studio Roosegaarde with Heijmans Infrastructure. 





A successful example of territorial Visual Marketing, judging from how quickly the pictures of the bicycle path went globally viral. Photos that transmit the atmosphere of “Starry Night” painted by Van Gogh in 1889, and one of his most well-known artworks, clearly the inspiration for this project that skilfully pulls together environmental sustainability – encouraging the use of bikes – with state-of-the-art technology and communication in the era of the Internet.





Turning the artwork into image: “Images are like water – eternal, bearer of myths – whereas their containers strongly depend on the timeline and therefore follow the flow of the interpretations.”, as Paolo Schianchi writes in the book, “Architecture on the Web. A critical approach to communication”.





The Van Gogh-Roosegaarde Bicycle Path is proof of how important visual communication is as a strategy – in urban planning as much as anywhere else!

(Christiane Bürklein)

Commissioned by Province of Brabant and city of Eindhoven. 
Designed by Daan Roosegaarde and Studio Roosegaarde with Heijmans. 
Location: Nuenen, the Netherlands 
Year: 2014
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