Virtual CIAM Museum Virtual CIAM Museum

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, architecture institutions acquired massive design production collections. All over the world, they accumulated a plethora of documents, objects, drawings, correspondence, films, photos, slides and complete work dossiers. As a result, museums, archives and depots today contain a boundless wealth of design and construction knowledge and experience. So how to open up these vast repositories beyond the reading room?

What if we could connect those scattered archives around the world using newly available digital technologies? What if we could unlock historical experience and knowledge for the benefit of audiences today and tomorrow? And what if we were able to recount the stories - known and untold - in full, by creating a new kind of public space?

Familiar histories could be presented afresh to new audiences, while at the same time marginalised and forgotten voices, lost experiments, and overlooked adventures and exchanges might come into focus once more, to be recaptured and studied. Such ambitions are among the motivations driving the development of prototypes for a new virtual museum, to test possibilities and start imagining what such a museum without walls could look like.

For these prototypes, the CIAM archives in the national collection of the Nieuwe Instituut are providing a first testing ground. CIAM was the international organisation of modern architects founded by a group of avant-garde practitioners in 1928. It included Le Corbusier, Berlage, Gerrit Rietveld, Mart Stam and many more, and it would become the leading platform for reconceptualising architecture, housing and urban planning in the most radical ways. Between 1928 and 1959, CIAM organised various conferences - hence its full name, Congrès Internationaux des Architecture Moderne - at which architects from around the world presented their designs and research. Due to its international network, the archives of its members were scattered around the world. A Virtual CIAM Museum will make it possible to reconnect these voices, while probing their histories and their relevance for today and for future planning.

In the framework of the Prototypes for a Virtual CIAM Museum three test-cases have been developed:

The prototypes have been developed together with PhD researchers Paula Strunden, Claudia Mainardi and Jhono Bennett, who are all participants in the EU sponsored project TACK: Communities of Tacit Knowledge in Architecture. The Virtual CIAM Museum is an initiative of Dirk van den Heuvel and the Jaap Bakema Study Centre.