Nieuwe Instituut in 2025: Exhibitions, international projects and other activitiesNieuwe Instituut in 2025: Exhibitions, international projects and other activities

• This press release presents a selection of exhibitions and other projects in 2025 at the Nieuwe Instituut, the national museum for architecture, design and digital culture.

• In 2025, the Nieuwe Instituut will open two important new exhibitions: one in May on the Chinese architect Ma Yansong, who designed the Tornado above the new Fenix Museum of Migration in Rotterdam, and FUNGI: Anarchist Designers in the autumn.

• Nieuwe Instituut will also be active internationally in 2025, including as curator of the cultural programme of the Dutch pavilion at the World Expo in Osaka, Japan; as client of the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale; and during the Milan Design Week.

• Visitors to the Nieuwe Instituut in 2025 will also be able to visit previously opened exhibitions such as Garden Futures, Dutch, More or Less and Future Makers! as well as permanent exhibits such as Sonneveld House, the pop-up concept shop New Store and the digital test lab -1.

From 19 February 2025: Design Biennale Rotterdam
At the end of February, the first Design Biennale Rotterdam will transform the city with exhibitions, talks and events dedicated to collectable design. This unique event is made possible by the combined efforts of over 15 venues and hundreds of designers, curators and creatives from Rotterdam and beyond. As the main partner of the biennale, the Nieuwe Instituut will host a number of activities between Wednesday 19 February and Sunday 2 March, including a symposium on the role of design in shaping cities and communities.

From 16 May 2025: Ma Yansong: Architecture and Emotion
In May, the new Fenix Museum of Migration will open in Rotterdam, with an eye-catching roof-top Tornado designed by the Chinese architect Ma Yansong. At the same time, the Nieuwe Instituut will open the first exhibition outside China on the internationally influential Beijing-based architect and his studio MAD Architects, founded in 2004. Curated by Aric Chen, the exhibition offers a journey through Ma’s work, from his critical response to modernism to expressive designs that refer to Chinese tradition and to conceptual relationships between humanity, nature and emotion.

From 6 June 2025: BNA Best Building of the Year
In June, the announcement of BNA Best Building of the Year and the award ceremony will take place at and in partnership with the Nieuwe Instituut. This 20th edition of the award will be celebrated with the opening of an exhibition of the most significant highlights of Dutch architecture from the past 20 years.

From 22 November 2025: FUNGI: Anarchist Designers
Curated by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and Feifei Zhou, FUNGI: Anarchist Designers presents fungi – better known to us as mushrooms and toadstools – not as human resources such as food and medicine, nor as hip new materials for designers. Instead, this exhibition reveals fungi as anarchist designers through research-based collaborations between scientists and artists that show how these organisms undermine notions of safety, reinforce capitalist exploitation and create multispecies worlds.

On view until 13 April 2025: Garden Futures
Garden Futures shows how the garden can be a place for experiments in climate adaptation, biodiversity, social justice and a sustainable future, drawing on the work of famous designers and artists such as Roberto Burle Marx, Jamaica Kincaid, Mien Ruys and Derek Jarman, as well as local examples.

On view until spring 2026: Dutch, More or Less: Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital Culture
The long-running Dutch, More or Less presentation is the Nieuwe Instituut in a nutshell: the boundaries between architecture, design and digital culture have become blurred, meaning that the three disciplines belong in the same building! Over 70 interactive installations, fashion items, models and furniture pieces by Dutch icons such as OMA, Mina Abouzahra, Viktor&Rolf, MVRDV, Hella Jongerius and Iris van Herpen also prove how versatile and distinctive ‘Dutch design’ is, and why it is considered so ground-breaking worldwide.

On view until December 2026: Future Makers!
The long-running Future Makers! exhibition gets children involved in shaping the future through doing, making and discovering. What are their wishes for the future? What do they want to change? Future Makers! was made not only for, but also by children: a team of nine 8- to 12-year-olds helped with the thinking and decision-making, supported by 150 pupils from five Rotterdam primary schools, design agency Opperclaes and design collective STORE Rotterdam.

From 8 April 2025: Milan Design Week
While Milan Design Week is one of the world's leading design events, its hundreds of thousands of visitors put an unsustainable pressure on the quality of life in Milan and the surrounding region – from pollution and sky-high property prices to the CO2 emissions from all the kilometres travelled. In collaboration with the Dutch Embassy and the cultural agency cheFare, the Nieuwe Instituut invites three designers for a year-long residency during which they will explore possible design responses to these problems in collaboration with local communities.

From 13 April 2025: World Expo Osaka: Common Ground
The World Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan is an international event that will bring together more than 160 countries and organisations for cultural exchange and cooperation. Nieuwe Instituut has been appointed curator of the cultural programme for the Dutch pavilion. The programme will explore various themes and disciplines and will tie in with the overarching theme of the pavilion: Common Ground – which emphasises collaboration and dialogue.

From 10 May 2025: Biennale di Venezia
Every two years, the Nieuwe Instituut commissions the Dutch Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2025, curator Amanda Pinatih and designer Gabriel Fontana will transform the iconic Rietveld Pavilion into a sports bar. Through a queer lens, sport is viewed as an architectural system that regulates spaces, bodies and behaviour, thus offering an alternative view of societal norms around gender, identity and group dynamics. How can architecture resist normativity and create living environments that foster new forms of togetherness?

From May 29 Trailblazers of the Abstract
Nieuwe Instituut and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) are jointly organising a ‘dialogue exhibition’ juxtaposing two avant-garde movements: De Stijl, founded by Theo van Doesburg, and its Antwerp counterpart, the Kring Moderne Kunst [Modern Art Circle], led by Jozef Peeters. At the KMSKA, visitors can see drawings, paintings, architectural designs, graphics and furniture by artists including Theo van Doesburg, Cornelis van Eesteren, J.J.P. Oud, Vilmos Huszár, Jozef Peeters, Jos Léonard and Huib Hoste. The exhibition highlights both the shared ideals and the different visual languages of the two art movements.

Sonneveld House
Designed in the 1930s by architects Brinkman and Van der Vlugt, the Sonneveld House Museum is one of the best-preserved private homes in the Nieuwe Bouwen style. It shows how a prominent Rotterdam family embraced modernism, and how this choice coloured their daily living environment. A visit to Sonneveld House is now enriched by a sensory layer featuring touch, smells and sounds.

New Store
In the New Store, the Nieuwe Instituut explores and tests the possibilities of regenerative shopping. This pop-up concept store in the foyer sells actual products by local designers, all of which in their own way make a positive contribution to the ecosystem of which they are a part.

-1
Among the humming servers in the basement of the Nieuwe Instituut is -1, a laboratory and exhibition space devoted to digital culture. This year it hosts an exhibition and activity programme on ‘noise cancellation’. Lose yourself in immersive digital art that attempts to interpret a world with and without sound. In the autumn, a fresh group of digital artists-in-residence will begin developing new works.

Future Studio Oostkop
Future Studio Oostkop is an initiative of the Nieuwe Instituut and the Board of Government Advisors. In this free-thinking space, everyone is welcome to ‘practice’ with the future of Dutch spatial planning, urban design and other design issues.

New Garden
New Garden is the newly redesigned outdoor space of the Nieuwe Instituut. It is used to address current design issues, with ecological management and the creation of high levels of biodiversity as starting points.

Nieuwe Café
Our café, run by chef Manuela Goncalves Tavares, offers delicious vegan and vegetarian dishes with seasonal ingredients and has one of the most beautiful terraces in Rotterdam.

NAi Booksellers
Located in the foyer of the Nieuwe Instituut, NAi Booksellers is a bookshop specialising in publications on architecture, landscape architecture, design and urban planning.

Accompanying images are available here.

Contact: Keesje Heldoorn, Press officer, via press@nieuweinstituut.nl