Het Nieuwe Instituut Online #7
During the temporary closure of Het Nieuwe Instituut, a weekly newsletter provides an update on our online programming and a selection of our online content. This web page is based on Newsletter #7 - 7 May 2020.
7 May 2020
The Interior and The Body
In recent years, the market has viewed the home interior primarily as the personal domain for all kinds of luxury marketing. The shower, for instance, was required to become a 'personal spa', where the exhausted body would be not so much cleansed as totally revitalised. And for the less fortunate among us, there was always the scented candle to lend an aura of peace and contemplation to every laundry room.
Covid-19 has broken through that reality - at least temporarily- and now design seems primarily to have the basic task of subjecting the public interior to the most rudimentary forms of inclusion and exclusion. While countries like South Korea and Taiwan primarily use data to give digital form to safety and control, in The Netherlands the physical distance of 1.5 metres is the yardstick by which every public interior is calculated.
Now Online at Het Nieuwe Instituut
Every week, we announce new items in our programme - this time, in the form of a one-week course and a one-time ritual - through our newsletter, while at the same time reflecting on the richness and lasting relevance of the institute's public web archive. An archive that has grown to more than 6000 pages and 250 'web magazines' and that is characterised by a social perspective on design.
Charlie Koolhaas & Madelon Vriesendorp Now that the home interior is a symbol of isolation and no longer an expression of privacy or personality, it's time to reflect on new forms of escape and on our own identity. Because many of us are forced to stay indoors, Madelon Vriesendorp and Charlie Koolhaas invite us to take a one-week course online and continue our inward journey, asking ourselves who 'we' are, what 'we' want and why. Each participant will be involved in a process of reflection and design through joint live meetings, instructional videos and reference material.
Spirit Strategies at home, in collaboration with HipHopHuis G/D THYSELF is an installation in Het Nieuwe Instituut that invites reflection. The measures against Covid-19 increase the desire for community and togetherness. This is the background for a series of rituals entitled Spirit Strategies, which can be followed online. The various instructions are shared every Friday from 11:00 to 12:00, on the basis of which a collective experience is stimulated as well as an individual one. The first Spirit Strategies session on Friday 8 May was realised with HipHopHuis from Rotterdam. Every other week, the installation is made available to a community in Rotterdam to use it at its own discretion and for its own requirements. Send an email to gdthyself@hetnieuweinstituut.nl to reserve a time slot.
The Neufert Hundreds of thousands of copies of the handbook Bauentwurfslehre, by German architect Ernst Neufert (1900-1986), appeared between 1936 and 2018. It is full of height, length and width measurements for every conceivable design task. Het Nieuwe Instituut's collection of books and archives contains 18 copies. Thanks to Neufert, everyone knows that a school drawing board is 70 centimetres high, 80 centimetres long and 70 centimetres wide, and that narrow gauge is preferably between 75 centimetres and 1 metre wide. And that shaking hands requires a distance of 1.3 metres. Does this standardization and rationalization of architecture contain an answer to the question of the 1.5 metre society? More about this in our newsletter soon.
Interior Design in Wartime American writer Matthew Stadler gave the ninth Benno Premsela Lecture at the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam in 2013. He offered a completely new perspective on the interior at the time of far-reaching digitization and pointed to the dangers of the current observation society.
The Life Fair The exhibition _The Life Fair. New Body Products _presented, through a series of universal themes - such as birth, work, sex, safety and health - how striving for the optimal body has developed into a highly competitive market. Now that Covid- 19 is challenging current ideas about the body, safety and health, this project proves its urgency once again.
Playboy Architecture 1953-1979 The 2013 exhibition Playboy Architecture, curated by Beatriz Colomina, showed how architecture and design were used by Playboy magazine as important tools for developing a new identity for the American man - and a corresponding interior. An interior in which the bed would take on a dominant role, and work and intimacy become completely intertwined.
Design platform From Het Nieuwe Instituut's foundation, art director Maureen Mooren has played an advisory role in the creation of almost all the institute's projects, including exhibitions and publications. She is also the driving force behind our institutional role as client. The results can be seen on the graphic design platform, soon to be expanded with all spatial designers who have been involved in the institute. Thanks to Mooren, the institute has developed a graphic identity based on varying contributions from the field. At the same time, she has designed the graphic context, which functions as a repeating and therefore recognizable reference and within which multiple designers can contribute. She is also responsible for the first web cover in the series and the associated banners which were developed for the Online programme.
Web cover
Commissioning in the time of Covid-19. Every week, Het Nieuwe Instituut invites a designer to design a web cover for the website in response to the question: What's occupying you now? This week the cover is designed by Jungmyung Lee.
In _1:1 Sets for Erwin Olaf and the parallel exhibition Bekleidung_, two ideas about the culture of the interior were the starting point: the interior as an expression of the individual, and the interior as the starting point of architecture
Read more about the Landscape and Interior Research Line
Read _Learning from the Virus _by Paul B. Preciado on ArtForum
View the web magazine of WORK, BODY, LEISURE, the concept of the Dutch Pavilion during the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2018