Het Nieuwe Instituut

Discover the story of Workwear at the Nieuwe Instituut exhibition opening 26 March 2023. Originally purely functional, workwear evolved to protect and support the wearer while performing heavy tasks. Today, it is a powerful symbol of the ‘working class’ with an unavoidable presence on the street and the catwalk.

Visit the exhibition Prix de Rome Architecture 2022 – Healing Sites, which opens on 18 November 2022 at Het Nieuwe Instituut. Featuring the entries of the shortlisted architects for the Prix de Rome Architecture 2022, with exhibition design by Zico Lopes (Spatial Codes), it reveals how finalists Arna Mačkić, Dividual (Andrea Bit and Maciej Wieczorkowski), Lesia Topolnyk, and Studio KIWI (Kim Kool and Willemijn van Manen) respond to the Healing Sites theme.

Het Nieuwe Instituut presents the exhibition Have we met? humans and non-humans on common ground, the official Dutch contribution to the 23rd International Exhibition Triennale Milano, which is on show until 11 December 2022 in Milan. The overall theme of Triennale Milano this year is Unknown Unknowns. The exhibition, comissioned by Het Nieuwe Instituut, has won the Golden Bee award presented by the Triennale, which is awarded on the basis of the precision of the interpretation of the theme and the quality and relevance of the ideas that have been put forth. 

As part of Rotterdam Architecture Month, Het Nieuwe Instituut and international architecture and design platform The World Around present A Weekend of Architecture’s Now, Near, Next. The two-day programme features In Focus: Precarity, the joint conference on design in crisis areas, on 11 June. 

Het Nieuwe Instituut proudly announced The Podium: a spectacular platform on institute’s roof. The striking pink installation with its imposing external staircase was designed by architects MVRDV and was an extension of the institute’s exhibition MVRDVHNI: The Living Archive of a Studio. Open from 1 June to 17 August 2022, The Podium offered a unique opportunity to experience architecture, the city, Museum Park and the institute from a completely new perspective. For the very first time, the roof of the institute was accessible to visitors.

The Memory of the Designed Landscape programme provides the impetus for a future-proof perspective on the archiving of garden and landscape design. A three-year programme aims to create a broad consensus whereby the importance of a careful handling of garden and landscape design archives is anchored in policy as a public responsibility.

Design Drafts is a growing writing and publishing network dedicated to investigating and drafting what it means to write about design today. Through collaborations between Het Nieuwe Instituut and different magazines and publishing platforms, the series sets out to stimulate emerging forms of design writing and discourse.

Rotterdam can be regarded as an archive of knowledge, of which only a fraction is made visible and utilized. There is, however, much more knowledge at hands that can contribute to a city that is better functioning for, and is more closely connected to, all its inhabitants. The New Academy is an initiative of Het Nieuwe Instituut in collaboration with Braidotti which aims to make urban transformation an inclusive process that does justice to a multifaceted city like Rotterdam.  

Visions of the future change with technological and social developments. In this installation by researcher and designer Richard Vijgen, visitors can explore future visions from the past 20 years with the help of artificial intelligence. 

In April 2022, Het Nieuwe Instituut is celebrating spring with an inclusive, diverse and more-than-human programme. The institute becomes a nature-friendly zoöp, reopens The New Garden, and launches the exhibition In Search of the Pluriverse. Designers and architects investigate how different life forms, communities and landscapes can best energise each other, exploring wide-ranging ways they can shape equal worlds together. 

The Agency for Architecture, Design, and Digital Culture connects design fields with questions from the outside world, both regional and international.

Automated Landscapes is a long-term collaborative research initiative on the implications of automation for the built environment, launched in 2017 by Het Nieuwe Instituut, and directed by its Research department.

This web magazine documents the proceedings, output and cultural context of the Bot Club, a recurring programme on algorithmic culture, one of the long-term research projects of Het Nieuwe Instituut’s R&D department.

Through the research project Collecting Otherwise, we read the architectural collection of Het Nieuwe Instituut and the practice of collecting and archiving from a perspective that is in line with current social changes. In 2021, we investigated (the presence of) intersectional feminist and queer spatial practices. This year, Collecting Otherwise spotlights the relationship between the architecture collection and colonial history. We are focusing on developing alternative methods for acquiring, classifying and propagating heritage.

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. 

Disclosing Architecture is a six-year initiative to increase the visibility and continued accessibility of the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning, made possible by a one-off investment from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science..

Het Nieuwe Instituut has a hybrid programme of online and offline activities. Het Nieuwe Instituut Online is the platform for livestream events.

A programme about world-making design on the fringes of Europe.

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

Invented from Copies is a research project under the umbrella of Disclosing Architecture that examines an undervalued element of the archive collection: the architectural reproduction. Het Nieuwe Instituut explores how these reproduction techniques relate to the design process and to design culture. 

The Jaap Bakema Study Centre is a collaborative project of Het Nieuwe Instituut and the Faculty of Architecture of TU Delft. It initiates and undertakes research projects that result in exhibitions, publications, and public events, often in collaboration with third parties and within international networks. The Jaap Bakema Study Centre combines contemporary social issues with fundamental research and knowledge development in the field of the creative industry: design, culture and society.

Members of Het Nieuwe Instituut support our mission to navigate the vast and evolving field of design. Be inspired by our special program of Members’ events and meet up with other like-minded people as we invite you to reflect with us on changing role of design in technology, economy, culture and society.

Design and digital culture contribute significantly to the way Dutch society defines, manifests and develops itself. A well-preserved, open and accessible archive is therefore a precondition for the design discipline in order to meet the task assigned to it by Dutch culture and society. The Network Archives Design and Digital Culture has therefore been created as a partnership between heritage organisations including Het Nieuwe Instituut, knowledge and research institutions, and individual archives of Dutch design heritage.

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.

New presentations of mainly young design talent can be seen in the foyer of Het Nieuwe Instituut every few weeks. It is a way of highlighting a striking design or innovative research, whether or not it is connected with the current exhibition and debate programme of Het Nieuwe Instituut.

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.

Studio Visits is a series of evenings dedicated to contemporary architectural practice, its challenges and its possibilities. The series invites professionals, students and the broader public to cross the threshold and take a peek into the architect’s workplace.

What is talent? When is someone considered a talent? Which values and qualities do we attribute to the concept?

From 3 September 2022 through 5 March 2023, Het Nieuwe Instituut is presenting a series of projects that focus on the interaction between the sun, solar energy, people and design. 

Thursday Night Live! is a weekly evening devoted to burning questions in architecture, design and digital culture, featuring leading speakers from home and abroad. Het Nieuwe Café serves a meal, there’s music from DJs or live perfomers, the museum is open for free and our Detour Guides (aka tour guides) show you around the exhibitions. Meet people, be inspired and join the discussion!

Total Space explores interdisciplinary exchanges between the fields of architecture, urban planning, anthropology and systems theory. The installation Animal Encounters is part of the Total Space project.

Het Nieuwe Instituut is a stylish and well-equipped venue for symposiums, congresses, lectures, meetings, presentations, receptions, lunches and dinners. The building offers an inspiring and creative atmosphere for your (corporate) event.

Vertical Atlas is a project about techno-political cartography developed through a series of five events. Departing from the conceptual model laid out by Benjamin Bratton in The Stack, this series aims at investigating specific geozones where the entanglement of different sovereignties surface and different stacks clash. Vertical Atlas is developed by Hivos, Het Nieuwe Instituut and Stedelijk Museum.

Enter is an experimental platform for online and hybrid meetings in the cultural field.

Enter was initiated by Het Nieuwe Instituut in the spring of 2019.

MVRDVHNI: The Living Archive of a Studio explores the archive of architecture office MVRDV. Het Nieuwe Instituut displays the MVRDV archive as a living entity in an office context, rather than in a museum gallery context. As a working environment, after all, the office is the place where ideas and projects move fluidly back and forth between present, past and future.

In this exhibition, on show at Het Nieuwe Instituut from September 2021, curator Saskia van Stein examines the influence of Disney’s films and thinking on today’s built environment and sense of identity.

Designing the Social  is an exhibition exploring 100 years of socially driven, idiosyncratic ideas about living together. Sometimes out of idealism, often out of pure necessity, alternative design strategies were developed in the pursuit of an equal society.

With a multifaceted Temporary House of Home Het Nieuwe Instituut explores how our thinking about domestic interiors and design has evolved over the past decades. 

City plans are often only partly based on the realities of their current residents, instead reflecting projections of ideal situations and citizens. With this in mind, Het Nieuwe Instituut created the Rotterdam for Real framework.

Het Nieuwe Instituut works with Rotterdam-based collective Concrete Blossom and its founder Malique Mohamud on a regular and intensive basis. As partners in a long-term trajectory, the institute and collective combine their efforts to research and experiment with possible approaches to cultural programming and institutional practice that are better attuned to the needs and potential of a super-diverse city like Rotterdam. Together, we explore the Inbetween, a (design) domain found in the space between formal institutions and the informal knowledge and art produced by a multifaceted contemporary counterculture.

Designers, theorists, artists, researchers, filmmakers and others share their vision of the designed world in this magazine. Het Nieuwe Instituut invites contributors to reflect on decolonisation and racial justice from a design perspective.

Conceived as a spa resort, the exhibition Lithium highlights the beneficial and destructive aspects of the eternal human search for energy. Researchers, designers and artists reflect on the role of the chemical element lithium in powering today’s economy. 

A new look at the work of Nelly and Theo van Doesburg is possible thanks to the restoration of their architecture archive. The exhibition recognises Nelly as a key figure in the consolidation of the reputation of Van Doesburg and De Stijl. 

Gallery 3 By You is Het Nieuwe Instituut’s initiative to make museum presentation space available to makers from the field.

At Het Nieuwe Instituut, children and young people discover that everything around them is designed, and get to try design techniques themselves.

Reading Sites is a series of written perspectives on the broader field of design.

As an extension of their short film AS TOLD TO G/D THYSELF, The Ummah Chroma collective provides a sacred space at Het Nieuwe Instituut entitled G/D THYSELF: Spirit Strategy On Raising Free Black Children. The sacred space invites visitors to explore themes of meta-physical transcendence, spirituality, and self-expression.

This exhibition considers the role of a fashion garment as a socio-political carrier. The hoodie is a staple of contemporary dress, hyped as a trend and a must-have item; but elsewhere it is also a topic of moral panic, banned by certain institutions and dissected by the media as an emblem of inequality, crime or deviancy.Curated by writer and curator Lou Stoppard.

Het Nieuwe Instituut and Tilting Axis are launching the third iteration of the Fellowship program for mid-career or established applicants based in the Caribbean. The initiative aims to foster and stimulate mutual exchange between the Caribbean region and the Dutch cultural field. Together with the leading partners - Het Nieuwe Instituut and Tilting Axis - other cultural institutions including Amsterdam Museum, De Appel, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Kunstinstituut Melly will collaborate with the selected applicant during the Fellowship.

The exhibition Malware, curated by Bas van de Poel and Marina Otero Verzier, focusses on the most infamous examples of computer viruses. These form the starting point for an exploration of questions of security, warfare and geopolitics in times of rapid technological advance. 

Starting in the Spring of 2019, 100 years after the foundation of Bauhaus, Het Nieuwe Instituut transforms into Neuhaus, a temporary transdisciplinary academy for more-than-human knowledge. Het Nieuwe Instituut joins the worldwide celebration of the Bauhaus centenary not by glorifying the historical achievements of this legendary school, but rather by reactivating and embodying its original spirit.

From 19 October onwards Het Nieuwe Instituut presents the work of the four nominees for the Prix de Rome Architecture 2018

With a temporary archive installation, Het Nieuwe Instituut speculates on the possible contents of an archive for design and digital culture from the Netherlands. Who will save what – and how, and why – for future generations? Together with its visitors, Speculative Design Archive uncovers the value of both acknowledged masterpieces and forgotten treasures.

For the Record investigates how contemporary video culture operates as a public space for consumerism, activism and emancipation, by exposing existing realities and by imagining alternatives.

In 2018 Het Nieuwe Instituut embarks on a new programme around the theme of burn-out. The initiative addresses the exhaustion of a growing number of human and other bodies, as a symptom of the presence of exploitative structures within society throughout institutional, political and biological ecologies.

On 2 November 2017 philosopher, curator and transgender activist Paul B. Preciado gave the 2017 Benno Premsela Lecture. One of the leading thinkers in the study of gender and sexual politics, Preciado addressed architecture as a technology of subject production.

WORK, BODY, LEISURE, first conceived as the Dutch contribution to the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, addresses the spatial configurations, modes of living, and notions of the human body engendered by disruptive changes in labor ethos and conditions. The exhibition was on show in Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam from December 2018 to March 2019.

Artist Jonas Staal presents the first retrospective of the films, cultural and political work of Stephen K. Bannon

With Dissident Gardens, Het Nieuwe Instituut focuses on the most current expressions of the classic struggle between nature and culture. The programme includes a multi-part installation, a related exhibition (The Human Insect) and a series of lectures and debates.

The exhibition Letters to the Mayor – Rotterdam is one result of a year-long collaboration on the theme of ‘City Forces’ between Het Nieuwe Instituut and Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. 66 architects and urbanists wrote 46 letters to the Mayor of Rotterdam. The letters were on show — together with audio recordings of the letters — from 12 January to 11 February 2018.

During the exhibition opening, Mayor of Rotterdam Ahmed Aboutaleb invited the letter writers to summarise the 46 letters in the 5 most pressing themes for the city of Rotterdam. These topics were presented in a meeting with the mayor and aldermen on March 4.

As the curators of the exhibition Finders Keepers, the editors of the design and crafts magazine MacGuffin reveal the universe of the collector, bringing together objects from dozens of collections and exploring the collectors’ strategies, the aesthetic pleasure of collecting and the hidden life of things.

The exhibition The Other Architect, organised by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, explores the practice of various architects since the 1960s who have embraced a broader definition of their roles as designers. It showcases architecture’s potential to identify the urgent issues of our time, featuring 22 case studies that illustrate how international and often multidisciplinary groups invented and adopted new methods outside of traditional design practices.

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.

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.

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

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. 

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.

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.

The New Garden has been part of the outdoor space of Het Nieuwe Instituut since 2015. It is used to raise current design issues. Ecological management and creating a high level of biodiversity are the starting points. In the winter of 2021, the garden was redesigned due to the restructuring of the Museum Park. In the coming years, work will be done on the ecological restoration of the garden and it will come into full bloom once more.

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 fabricated 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.

At the invitation of the TextielMuseum and Het Nieuwe Instituut, local and international experts will discuss the latest developments in electronic textiles. What does the application of e-textiles offer to architecture and interior design? What challenges and opportunities lie in the interdisciplinary research and development processes of material developers, technologists, companies, designers and architects?

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.

What does it take to make a city buzzy, creative and entrepreneurial? How can creativity help to enhance older citizens’ quality of life? And how can you breathe life back into derelict areas? Questions such as these will be addressed in a series of workshops for Asian and European creative experts organised by Het Nieuwe Instituut.

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?

The way people in the Netherlands deal with water is changing. Rather than fighting nature by building ever-higher dykes and using more and more technology, they are searching for methods of integrating natural systems with the built environment in order to cope with the effects of climate change. Urban water systems are not yet equipped to handle increasingly extreme and frequent rainfall, droughts and heat waves. Though the Netherlands has been coping with a wet climate for centuries, existing solutions no longer suffice. Het Nieuwe Instituut’s archive harbours countless historical examples of how the integration of hydraulic engineering and water management into spatial planning, urban development and landscape architecture can add cultural, social, ecological and economic value.

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.

A century after the outbreak of World War I, Het Nieuwe Instituut looks at the relationship between war and creativity in the events programme 2014–1914: Conflict and Innovation. Component projects include the radio tour Radio Neutraal. Het Nieuwe Instituut’s building provides a dramatic setting for Radio Neutraal, which takes the Dutch government's attitude in World War I as its point of departure but goes beyond political history. The project looks at neutrality as a recurrent productive strategy used by a range of Dutch designers, architects and policymakers. The radio report is illustrated with historical visual material, models and recent designs. Contributors include Samuël Kruizinga, Timo de Rijk, Gijs van Oenen and Ben Schouten.

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.

What will the future look like when nobody writes anymore, or when people live on the planet Mars? Students of the Willem de Kooning Academy present future scenario's that glimpse into these possible futures in the exhibition Design Fiction in Het Nieuwe Instituut from 23 January until 2 February. The projects are presented in relation to the event How Do You Do Biodesign where one of the topics is Design Fiction.

As global urbanisation has proceeded over recent decades, human beings have become increasingly removed from nature. At the same time, we remain as dependent on it as ever for our primary needs. To an increasing degree, cities are tasking organic, biological systems with supporting their industrial systems. Unless the relationship between “nature” and human-organised systems is improved, energy, water and food supplies will be placed under pressure.

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 (17 November 2013 t/m 30 March 2014) are the first part of a triptych that Het Nieuwe Instituut is devoting to the interior. This part introduces visitors to two of the most original ideas on the culture of the interior: the idea of the interior as an expression of the individual, and the interior as the starting point of architecture. Both ideas go back to nineteenth-century Romanticism and have lost none of their topicality today.

The Sonneveld House, built in 1933 in Rotterdam, is one of the best-preserved houses of the Nieuwe Bouwen style. The renowned Rotterdam designer Richard Hutten was invited by Het Nieuwe Instituut to respond to the design of this house museum.

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.

On Tuesday 15 October, the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg opened Russia’s first exhibition on Dutch postwar architecture. Through 200 items from the collection of Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, including photographs, drawings and models, Architecture the Dutch Way, 1945–2000 illustrates how the Netherlands reshaped itself after the Second World War.

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.

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.