Het Nieuwe Instituut

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.

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.

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.