Het Nieuwe Instituut

The Other Architect, an exhibition of architects who expanded their role in society to shape the contemporary cultural agenda without the intervention of built form.

Myriad forms of appropriation, such as squatting, play an essential role in the development of the city and public space. Architecture of Appropriation examines ideas such as vacancy, property, alternative living arrangements and housing policy.

Designing the Surface, an exhibition where the final topcoat targets the senses, investigates a compendium of artefacts over five sets: lustre, patina, faux, teflon and agency.

Rafaël Rozendaal questions the anonymity and ephemerality of the screensaver and is fascinated by its subversive, playful and diffuse character. He creates an immersive space for the visitor that captures the extraordinary visual language of this virtually lost medium.

How do truth and myth relate to archives? From 28 January until 25 June 2017 Het Nieuwe Instituut presents the project The Transylvania Archive by artist duo Marta Volkova and Slava Shevelenko. The project ingeniously weaves together themes such as the relevance of the archive, how artists relate to power, and fear of strangers.

To celebrate the hundredth anniversary of De Stijl, Het Nieuwe Instituut has formed partnerships with several other cultural institutions, including a co-production with the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague.

Het Nieuwe Instituut has established the Agency for Architecture, Design and Digital Culture to cater to the needs of the professional field at large.

Het Nieuwe Instituut manages 600 archives and collections of Dutch architects, urban planners, professional associations and educational institutions, comprising a total of some 4,000,000 documents. The collection is available for research in the Study Centre.

Het Nieuwe Instituut's programming and R&D has an international focus that reflects the fact that design operates in a global field and presents itself on a global stage

Research projects initiated and carried out at the Jaap Bakema Study Centre can lead to exhibitions, publications, discussions and specific partial studies related to the activities of Het Nieuwe Instituut and the research programme of Faculty of Architecture at the Delft University of Technology. The study centre also facilitates research by and with third parties. The activities of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre are socially relevant and generate discussion of current issues. It also contributes to fundamental research and knowledge development on the creative industry, design, culture and society.

Weekly presentations in the foyer, spotighting a controversial new design, sensational research, work by an emerging talent or a new acquisition for the State Archive for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning. Admission free.

In the regional programme, Het Nieuwe Instituut concentrates on projects with local and regional governments that have a certain urgency for a particular region.

In recent years, the concept and practice of research has attracted renewed attention within the cultural sector. Research plays a critical role in elucidating the relevance of both existing and new ideas, and the responsibility of institutions in their construction and promotion. 

Studio Rotterdam aims to articulate new perspectives on contemporary issues and future challenges in Rotterdam. Design and designers, preferably local, will play a key role in this.

The New Haberdashery was established as part of the Temporary Fashion museum. It is a studio in which visitors can try their hand at making clothes and other textile products.

The multiyear cultural programme De Staat van Eindhoven (The State of Eindhoven) looks at the changing relationship between government and citizens and, specifically, Eindhoven’s twofold ambition of being a smart city in a participatory society.

Het Nieuwe Instituut’s Thursday Night programme addresses varied issues related to architecture, design and digital culture. Each week there is a lecture or talk show, a pop-in expo, a Thursday Bite and various partner programmes, as well as a chance to visit the exhibitions.

Het Nieuwe Instituut researches, presents and represents the disciplines architecture, design and digital culture. It aims to involve designers in various ways in its activities and to provide a podium alongside the usual programme of exhibitions and lectures. Graphic design is one of the design disciplines and is employed for Het Nieuwe Instituut’s internal and external communications.

The New Material Award invites artists and designers to present designs that offer innovative solutions to the issues of today and the challenges of tomorrow. Each project should integrate new materials, or innovative ways of using materials.

This web magazine contains background information about the interactive web documentary 51 Sprints, which puts the Olympic athlete centre stage.

The city of Rio de Janeiro has an advanced command and control centre from which various scenarios – from traffic jams to acts of terrorism and natural disasters –  can be predicted and potentially prevented. The installation Control Syntax Rio, on show at Het Nieuwe Instituut from 12 June 2016, shows how this Olympic city is being read as a matrix of potential calamities and the impact this has on the social climate of the city.

The 1972 Olympic Games offered the host country, West Germany, an unrivalled opportunity to portray itself to the world as a modern, democratic and culturally aware nation. This carefully constructed image was marred two weeks into the games when eight members of the Black September Organisation infiltrated the Olympic Village and took the Israeli team hostage. The exhibition Munich 1972. The Design of a Democratic Body tells this controversial story through the lens of design, by contrasting the narratives and aesthetic strategies of the organisers with the tactics deployed for their disruption.

The installation Space Embodied. The Russian Art of Movement 1920–1930, is about the new, free human as propagated by the Russian avant-garde. Space Embodied is an installation about the body in movement: life-size projections of dancers, a dance floor, stage sets and mirrors confront visitors in a direct and physical way with the historical material from the 1920s.

With universal themes such as Birth, Work, Sex, Security and Health, the exhibition The Life Fair: New Body Products explores how the quest for an optimal body has developed into a highly competitive market. First and foremost in the development of goods and services: commercial parties whose products exploit the fears and desires underlying our physical capacities and vulnerabilities.

Malkit Shoshan curated the exhibition BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions at the Dutch Pavilion during the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016. Shoshan, an architect and founder of the architecture think tank FAST, has been a fellow of Het Nieuwe Instituut for the past two years.

This series of four exhibitions is the result of an investigation into modest platforms and the ways in which they connect the human body with the surrounding physical (and sometimes digital) space. The successive installations address the yoga mat, the beach towel, the tatami and the prayer rug. The research focuses on the material and symbolic meanings of these platforms by exploring their history and the way they are used in different cultures.

The fifth exhibition in the series Surprising Finds from the Collection focuses on examples of fashion in various architectural drawings from the archives of Het Nieuwe Instituut. Featuring architectural sketches showing elegant ladies parading through the streets, chic gentlemen posing in front of villas and children enjoying an endless summer in front of their summer house. Part of the Temporary Fashion Museum.

Many Dutch museums include fashion within their collections but there has never been a national fashion museum. Over a period of eight months Het Nieuwe Instituut will explore the possibilities of such an institution by transforming itself into a fashion museum. The entire building will be utilised for this temporary experiment. 

In cooperation with the Society of Arts, Het Nieuwe Instituut organised the Benno Premsela Lecture 2015, given by Benjamin Bratton. Bratton's lecture examined the consequences of the widespread digitalisation for our cities. He sketched the way in which cities could develop in relation to algorithmic perception, sensory perception, cognition and physical automation

The Rotterdam Innovation Market presents seven very different innovations recently developed in the Rotterdam region. The innovations come from those sectors in which Rotterdam excels, such as Port and Logistics, Cleantech, and Architecture & Industrial Design.

Construction of The New Garden started in the spring of 2015 on the outdoor area around Het Nieuwe Instituut. Artist/designer Frank Bruggeman and ecological gardener Hans Engelbrecht have developed a plan to turn the strip of grass along Jongkindstraat into a place of encounter set amidst vegetation. At the same time, reeds and water-purifying plants breathe life into the pond in front of the building. In addition, The New Garden will connect with the Arcade, the covered space along Rochussenstraat, thus also enlivening this desolate side of the building.

In the spring of 2015 architecture-history and art-history students from the VU University in Amsterdam conducted research in the archives of Het Nieuwe Instituut into the development of housing for the elderly in the Netherlands. The archive contains a cross section of designs from the past hundred years. The variety of material shows that housing for the elderly is strongly linked to political and emancipatory processes.

The 34th World Expo opened in Milan on 1 May 2015. Under the title ‘Feeding the Planet. Energy for Life’, a collective of national states, multinationals and relief agencies assembled for the occasion will present the future of global agriculture, food and energy supply to millions of visitors. This occasion has prompted Het Nieuwe Instituut and Slow Food to initiate The Mansholt Letter; a plea to European policy makers for the introduction of a moral food policy and a new élan for the European Union.
 

In the context of the 34th World Expo opening in Milan this spring, Het Nieuwe Instituut addresses this phenomenon from different perspectives, between April 26 and August 23, in three exhibitions: What is the Netherlands, GLASS and Garden of Machines. The recurring question in the programme is: under what conditions is innovation achieved, and what role do designers play within that process?

In 2015 the Netherlands commemorates its occupation seventy-five years ago and celebrates its liberation seventy years ago. Monuments to Peace presents both realised and unexecuted designs for war memorials from the archives of Het Nieuwe Instituut. In the exhibition, three young designers and artists selected by Studio Makkink & Bey show how a new generation deals with themes of war and peace.

In the context of the 34th World Expo opening in Milan this spring, Het Nieuwe Instituut addresses this phenomenon from different perspectives between April 26 and August 23.  The exhibition What is the Netherlands shows how the Dutch entries to the World Expo have always been the result of collaborations between government, industry, designers and artists. 

In the context of the 34th World Expo opening in Milan on May 1st, Het Nieuwe Instituut addresses this phenomenon from different perspectives between April 26 and August 23.  The exhibition Garden of Machines speculates on a new ecosystem in which technical and organic beings learn to live together.  

In the context of the 34th World Expo opening in Milan on May 1st, Het Nieuwe Instituut addresses this phenomenon from different perspectives between April 26 and August 23. The exhibition GLASS shows how this age-old, man-made material is still inextricably connected to progress and how it continuously challenges contemporary designers to innovative experiments.

Midway through the past century the historically appointed period room in many museums made way for the ‘white cube’. Modern art needed neutral, white exhibition walls instead of historically decorated rooms. From 1 February to 6 April 2015 Het Nieuwe Instituut is taking the period room as the basis for a programme devoted to exhibition models. For 1:1 Period Rooms, the Greek architect and artist Andreas Angelidakis designs an installation and draws on period rooms held in the collection at the Amsterdam Museum, which have not been presented to the public since the 1970s.

Guest curator Petra Blaisse offers visitors a totally new experience of Sonneveld House with one ingenious intervention.

In the weekends of 18 and 24 January, Het Nieuwe Instituut is present in the German city of Cologne: during the special VIP preview of the exhibition DOMESTIC AFFAIRS and on the fair imm cologne with 3D-printing workshops I AM INDUSTRY.

The exhibition The Netherlands builds in brick modifies the assumed triumph of modernism in the period between the two world wars. Drawing on two collections of photographs from the archive, this third instalment in the series Surprising finds from the collection shows that brick remained a favoured construction material, even for experimentation.

PLASTIC: Promises of a Home-made Future is the third in a series of exhibitions about materials and their economic, cultural and social significance. Wood was the subject last time, and an exhibition about glass is currently under preparation. PLASTIC shows how far-reaching innovation in materials has fired the imagination for a century, yet continues to evoke doom scenarios.

Huis in een witte tutu is a series of painted interventions by Job Wouters.

Het Nieuwe Instituut presents the work of sixteen designers, artists and architects who are nominated for the New Material Award 2014.  The New Material Award challenges artists, designers and architects to create and present designs featuring the use of new materials and innovative techniques that contribute to a better and sustainable society.

From 16 October on Het Nieuwe Instituut is presenting the work of the eight nominees for the Prix de Rome Architecture 2014. As the oldest and biggest Dutch prize for artists and architects younger than 40, the Prix de Rome has been organized and financed since 2012 by the Mondriaan Fund. The exhibition showcases the importance of design and innovation, key principles of all activities at Het Nieuwe Instituut.

After Summer Dreams, the series Surprising finds from the collection descends into the night-time world of bohemians and night owls. How did architects over the past century manage to capture in their drawings the bustle as the audience gradually files into a theatre? What mood do their sketches conjure up of a café or club? And does any drawing depict the loneliness of the city, the emptiness after the party?

Dutch Structuralism is a movement in architecture in the late '50s and early '60s that renounced the technocratic planning that characterised the post-war reconstruction of the country. Instead, its proponents asked space for the poetic and emotional aspects of architecture, in order to come to a truly dignified living environment.

Sicco Mansholt was a farmer and social democrat who became an influential Dutch postwar agricultural minister. After 14 years as minister, Mansholt became the EEG’s first agricultural commissioner. In that role, he functioned as one of the architects of today’s European Union. Mansholt’s policy powerfully affected the economic position of farmers, the unification of Europe, and the design of the Dutch landscape. The installation for the exhibition as designed by Studio PolyLester, tracks the rise, fall and radical change of heart of this emblematic figure of European agricultural politics.

Summer Dreams is the first edition of Surprising Finds from the Collection. Summer Dreams is about sun, vacation and leisure. Drawings, models, photographs and other documents show how the Dutch spent their leisure time in the last century: outside in the sun, in the city, on the water, or in nature. From designs for swimming pools, summerhouses and luxury holiday resorts, to travel sketches and drawings of all that grows and blossoms. 

For the series Surprising Finds archivist Alfred Marks selects extraordinary drawings, photographs, objects and models from the archives of Het Nieuwe Instituut on the basis of a theme. The presentations do not necessarily show the highlights of the Dutch architectural history, but first and foremost show the richness, diversity and narrative power of the collection.

Scarcity is the mother of invention. The urban planning projects, buildings, interior objects and consumer goods in Designing Scarcity show that shortages don’t have to constrain creativity: quite the contrary. Curated by Jan Boelen of Z33 (Hasselt, Belgium), the exhibition showcases a panoply of strategies used by designers and users to find novel solutions in the face of limitation.

The Dutch entry at the 14th International Architectural Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia will examine the work and ideas of the architect Jaap Bakema. The exhibition Open: A Bakema Celebration will critically reflect on the idea of the open society through Bakema’s work and research.

This summer Het Nieuwe Instituut build a temporary house designed by architecture firm SeARCH on its grounds, directly opposite Sonneveld House. Bjarne Mastenbroek, founder of SeARCH, describes the design as a Yourtopia, a vision of 21st-century living that is as personal as it is utopian. Social themes such as the influence of globalisation, the longing for privacy, and the almost perverse imbalance in prosperity have radically altered the role of contemporary architects. In the pavilion design SeARCH returns to a fundamental question: what is the minimum needed to achieve a maximum quality of life?

Drones and Honeycombs is a long-term research project. It investigates the impact of the contemporary war and the global security apparatus on our physical environments and on our cities. In the past decades, and increasingly after 9/11, the frontline of war moved to the city. What does it means for the city, for architecture and for our roles as designers?

How can we go beyond the cult of progress to develop a better understanding of the radical technological innovations of today? The exhibition The Progress Trap formed the centre of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF) and brought together the work of international artists, including Cohen van Balen, Louis Philippe Demers, Jenny Holzer, Nam June Paik, Boris Petrovski and Melle Smets.

Current experiments with wood are leading to surprising applications in and outside the domains of architecture and design. The rich story of WOOD is told through design objects, architectural projects and artifacts from national and international collections, and references diverse geographical, historical and cultural contexts.

Het Nieuwe Instituut has commissioned the artist duo Lernert & Sander to design a spatial installation and live performance based on the historical collection of wallpaper manufacturer Rath & Doodeheefver at the Salone del Mobile, the international design fair in Milan.

The future of the Museumpark is in a state of flux. To grasp the subject, Het Nieuwe Instituut gave two teams of designers, artists, urban designers and storytellers a commission entitled Tracking Traces, asking them to come up with a new vision for this Rotterdam park.

Het Nieuwe Instituut and The Netherlands Study Centre for Technology Trends (STT) are organizing the joint symposium Art and Innovation: The Future of Interdisciplinarity on 19 March. For STT, the symposium marks the end of a foresight study in which new relations between art, science and technology were explored. Het Nieuwe Instituut will adopt the findings of these explorations, and will apply them in the development of their practice-based research.

Het Nieuwe Instituut examined the challenges and potential of the digital archive. Starting from the premise of the archive as system, a series of themes linked to exhibitions at Het Nieuwe Instituut formed the basis of new research by artists, designers and photographers, in search of the invisible layers of the digital archive. 

Het Nieuwe Instituut has invited Dutch research group The Mobile City to help it develop a dialogue around the concept of smart cities between Chinese and Dutch architects, media makers and designers. The project Made By Us was launched during the Beijing Design Week in partnership with the China Millennium Monument Museum of Digital Arts (CMoDA).

1:1 Sets for Erwin Olaf and the parallel exhibition Bekleidung are the first part of a triptych that Het Nieuwe Instituut is devoting to the interior in the next few years.

In November 2013 The New Institute and Crimson Architectural Historians organized a series of public meetings during the X Bienal de São Paulo called ‘Track Changes’. A generation of architects and urbanists, who are connected through a common attitude, were invited to meet in an arena built especially for the occasion. Whether working in the favelas of South America, the slums of India or in the crumbling housing estates of Europe, this generation has replaced the large-scale top down masterplan and the iconic hypermodern building with a participative, temporary and flexible bottom-up approach.

For the Biodesign exhibition, curator William Myers has selected dozens of projects that illustrate new ways to harness living systems for art, design and production

Het Nieuwe Instituut presents Designing Health, an exhibition on designing for health care, at the Designhuis in Eindhoven. Curated by Sabine Wildevuur, it shows how technology, innovation and design have influenced health care throughout history and what they are capable of contributing to it now and in the future. In Designing Health Het Nieuwe Instituut highlights the important role designers play in helping to keep and make people well.

Het Nieuwe Instituut is introducing a summer programme from 21 June 2013 under the title The Ruin. This marks the transition to the coming cultural year, in which Het Nieuwe Instituut makes use of various projects to give form to the multi-faceted ambitions. Besides eight presentations The Ruin consists of a parallel programme, including old questions, radical design practices, worn-out ideas and even the claim of a new Industrial Revolution. All in an awareness that everything passes and then comes back again, but in a slightly different guise.

Social designers are artists and designers who look at shared human problems from a different point of view. They come up with unexpected angles of approach and new ways of tackling apparently intractable challenges, such as obesity, demographic decline and early school leaving.