Book review of the research catalogue edited by Chris Dähne et al, at the occasion of the homonymous exhibition at the HfG Archiv and Museum Ulm in 2025, which was based on archival research and includes generous documentation from the archives of the famed school and its architectural department ... Read more

Discussion of the development of the Dutch welfare state and its spatial planning by way of close-reading the work of Jaap Bakema and his office Van den Broek and Bakema, in relation to the shift from socialism inspired planning ideas and the mixed economy of the Western European and Dutch welfare state, to the early beginnings of neo-liberalism. Based on a contribution to the seminar on welfare planning at the Sorbonne University ... Read more

Elaboration of the lecture given at the 2023 conference commemorating the 60th anniversary of the earthquake of Skopje, presenting the ideas and contributions of Jaap Bakema to the international design competition organised by the UN at the time; with special attention to the architectural concept of megastructures of the 1960s, and the exchanges between the avant-garde groups of Team 10 and Metabolism. ... Read more

Toelichting op de verwerving van de collectie van de Nederlandse architecten Aldo en Hannie van Eyck door het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, met name de maquettes die verworven zijn met behulp van steun van de Vereniging Rembrandt en Mondriaanfonds. ... Read more

Reflections on combined educational and research methods in Master education at the Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment, TU Delft, esp. the MSc 2 elective Housing Studies, from archival research and literature study to plan analysis, field work, oral histories and new AR/XR technologies. ... Read more

A series of experimental experiences brings projects from the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning to life through virtual reality. Using VR technology, students from TU Delft’s Virtual Architecture Museum research and design studio, have investigated the relationship between spatial design, media and historiography – the study of written history. The presentation is based on student work from the MSc 2 studio Virtual architecture Museum of TU Delft, supervised by Dirk van den Heuvel and Eytan Mann, supported by the BK VR Lab and Hans Hoogenboom ... Read more

In 1965, now sixty years ago, the architect of the Gradski Trgovski Centar in Skopje, Živko Popovski, travelled to Rotterdam to work at the famed office of Van den Broek and Bakema for about half a year. I spoke with a former employee, Frans Hooykaas, who worked as a direct assistant to Jaap Bakema including numerous competitions and public presentations. He is now 86 years old: do you remember him? Yes! He was full of energy and enthusiasm. I see his photo on the internet now, and recognize his grey mustache, at the time a well-groomed black line in a very lively face. He moved around as if his limbs, legs and arms were all connected by elastics. But sorry, not so much more. Did he work on the Skopje project? On the design that the Van den Broek and Bakema office submitted to the UN competition after the city was hit by an earthquake? Not sure... But it seems likely since he came from Skopje? Also handy in terms of language. If so, he must have worked with the group of Stokla in the office, who did most of the competitions. We were doing so many competitions in those years, big city schemes: Tel Aviv and Ashdod in Israel, the Pampus plan for Amsterdam, Frankfurt am Main in Germany, the university buildings in Bochum, Plovdiv in Bulgaria, Zurich... The special aspect of Skopje was to work with existing buildings, the remaining constructions after the disaster of the earthquake had to be spared and included. [...] ... Read more

‘Vanwege haar invloed en kennis was Luce vanaf de oprichting van Arcam een belangrijke informant en adviseur bij de programmering’, zegt Maarten Kloos, oprichter en voormalig directeur van Arcam. ‘Met haar ontwikkelde Arcam programma’s rondom toen nog onbekend, opkomend talent, zoals Rem Koolhaas en Ben van Berkel. Toen Arcam de structuur van informanten formaliseerde in een Programmaraad, werd Luce een van de eerste leden. Dat was ze bijna tien jaar lang, van 1989 tot en met 1997. Ze heeft al die tijd een belangrijke bijdrage geleverd aan de programmering en positionering van Arcam in de architectuurwereld, en daarbuiten.’

Op 29 juli 2025 overleed Luce van Rooy op 87-jarige leeftijd. Ze was beroemd vanwege haar galerie in Amsterdam, gespecialiseerd in architectuurtekeningen en maquettes. Bijzonder was de vanzelfsprekende verbinding tussen kunst en architectuur. [...] ... Read more

The course Housing Studies, aimed at master's students in architecture, articulates a critical pedagogy that interrogates the non-neutrality of the architectural discipline in shaping social relations and modes of life. Focusing on the analysis of twentieth-century collective housing projects, the course combines archival research and curatorial practice as tools for critical design. Through the engagement with historical documents and the construction of a collective exhibition, students reinterpret the past from an intersectional perspective that renders visible bodies and communities traditionally excluded from dominant narratives. This approach enables them to question spatial norms that reproduce inequalities of class, gender, race, age, or mobility, and to formulate new projective narratives. By interweaving historical analysis, graphic representation, and cultural production, the final exhibition becomes an act of design that dissolves the boundaries between classroom, archive, and society, fostering ethically engaged forms of architectural knowledge and practice. ... Read more

Introduction to the proceedings of the 12th annual conference of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre, briefly discussing histories of networks of exchange in architecture and the role of archives and institutions ... Read more

The recently established Architecture Archives of the Future group at TU Delft explores new educational formats to activate architectural archives as sources of design knowledge and traditions. To this end, it collaborates with the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, which holds the Dutch national collection of architecture and urban planning. By combining methods of comparative plan analysis and digital VR and XR technologies, students learn how to operationalize historical data and knowledge, curate these, and present them to a larger audience. Two courses serve as examples: one is a history and theory course, and the other is an experimental research and design studio. Through assemblage (the history and theory course) and immersion (the studio), the students learn to synthesize their findings into a critical narrative, assessing data, cultural and social values, and speculative questions about future knowledge and design production. ... Read more

Research and teaching residencies for faculty members offer a valuable opportunity to foster institutional collaboration and to exchange diverse perspectives and methodological approaches.The course Housing Studies: An Open Intersectional Archive, developed at the Faculty of Architecture of TUDelft during the 2024–2025 academic year, serves as the catalyst for the innovation currently being implemented in the Master's Degree in Habitat Innovation at the School of Architecture of the Universitat Politècnica de València for the 2025–2026 academic year. Through a critical review of the course’s objectives, methodology, outcomes, and assessment strategies, this reflection seeks to identify the key components of the pedagogical approach and its adaptation to a specialized academic context. The aim is to foster research grounded in Research by Design, articulated through the analysis of case studies. ... Read more

'Built Homecoming' presents the house of Aldo and Hannie van Eyck through a series of vitrines. These eight display cases capture special corners of the house, including the objects that populate these places. Through an arrangement of selected films, interior images, archival material, and artefacts from their home archive, the exhibition invites visitors to rediscover their work and ideas, while engaging with the complexities and implications of their approach to architecture and culture, particularly in relation to notions of Westernness and Eurocentricity. The choice of vitrines is crucial in this respect. Vitrines are a classic means of display, but they are also highly ambiguous: paradoxically, they are instruments of isolation and objectification, even as they provide protection and a temporary home for the selected materials. They regulate access and visibility, control the visitor’s gaze and frame the interpretation of the objects, ultimately shaping the narratives that surround them. The exhibition aims to critically rethink this framing, in order to reverse the objectifying gaze and allow for the relativity and reciprocity advocated by the Van Eycks. ... Read more

The combination of the three terms–architecture, coloniality and modernity– has turned out to be a most productive research field. Among its results it counts a growing library of new and innovative research, which aims to reassess established histories and theories to open the discourse for hitherto unheard and overlooked voices, as well as new conceptual frameworks and methodologies. Scholars in the field know that such reassessment is easier said than done. Despite this productivity, the structures of our institutions are also quite tenacious, even when one can observe signs of change. The struggles around those terms are not just related to power and the control over the discourse. They are particularly sensitive, since they concern issues of historical and archival justice, and who decides about that. Next to identity issues, value systems are brought into the equation; neutrality is neither possible nor accepted. More than before, positionality and relationality have become key aspects of research practices regarding their validity and criticality. [...] ... Read more

Developed for the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, this twin exhibition presents around 60 projects by the Berlin-based architectural team Sauerbruch Hutton and allows them to enter into conversation with selected documents of architectural history from the Baukunst Archiv of the Akademie, with projects by key modernist architects including Hans Scharoun, Hugo Häring, Konrad Wachsmann and many more.

On the occasion of the transfer of their advance legacy to the Academy’s Architectural Archives, Louisa Hutton and Matthias Sauerbruch and Tom Geister together with the curator Dirk van den Heuvel (TU Delft) have reconceived their retrospective exhibition “draw love build” and extended it significantly: iconic archival material from the first half of the 20th century generates surprising dialogues with contemporary positions. The approximately 100-year-old views of a rising generation serve as both inspiration and benchmark for an architecture that seeks to process current critical environmental and societal conditions. ... Read more

Dutch architect Jaap Bakema (1914-1981) was a central figure within international organisations such as the the avant-gardist CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) originally founded in 1928, and its successor Team 10. Both organisations can be analysed in terms of networks, with a multiplicity of exchanges between the involved actors. In order to create a picture of the network and explore its connections, an interactive visualisation prototype has been developed on the basis of the correspondence present in the archive of Bakema. The prototype allows visitors to navigate between people, places and archival documents. ... Read more

Is nature a human invention? It’s hard to imagine that nature conceives of itself as something called ‘nature’. As if there can be anything other than nature, or outside of nature. Only humans seem to be able to distinguish between what belongs to nature and what not, including human behavior itself apparently, with some bits of it designated as natural, others unnatural. These were just some of the impossible thoughts that crossed my mind during a walk along the gardens of the Nieuwe Instituut, Boymans van Beuningen, and the adjacent Museumpark. [...] ... Read more

This paper examines the case of Jaap Bakema (1914-81) as a precursor to participation and co-creation processes in city planning. Besides his architectural practice and prolific teaching, Dutch architect and Team 10 figurehead Bakema was deeply engaged in creating exhibitions to communicate his ideas to layman audiences. He played a role in de-signing the Dutch pavilions for Expo 1958 in Brussels and the one in Osaka in 1970, as well as in the city reconstruction festivals for Ahoy’ and E55, both in Rotterdam. These public events provided Bakema with opportunities to develop his ideological agenda for urban planning in relation to the large-scale modernization processes of the period and a new Dutch national identity within a Cold War geopolitical context, built on the idea of an open society. ... Read more

Bespreking van de tentoonstelling en prijsvraag van de Prix de Rome. Met als titel Healing Sites vroeg de jury van de Prix de Rome architectuur 2022 om een reflectie op niets minder dan de rol en medeplichtigheid van de architectuur in de massale vernietiging van ecosystemen als gevolg van kapitalisme, kolonialisme en imperialisme. De finalisten Arna Mačkić, Dividual (Andrea Bit en Maciej Wieczorkowski) , Lesia Topolnyk en Studio KIWI (Kim Kool en Willemijn van Manen) breken alle vier eerst veel af, waarna ze letterlijk op de resten van het verleden hun projecten opbouwen. ... Read more