Het Nieuwe Instituut

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.