Het Nieuwe Instituut

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.

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.

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

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 summer of 2019 AFARAI, in collaboration with the users of The New Garden, have developed a programme of interventions, public events and conversations about unscripted public space.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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. 

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.

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 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.

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.

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.