Beyond the Cover: The Whale Beyond the Cover: The Whale

Beyond the Cover explores the backstories of the buildings flaunted on the covers of the Architecture in the Netherlands yearbooks in the notorious heydays of Dutch architecture between 1990 and 2000. Invited architects will be asked to present their work beyond the familiar images of finished buildings, to privilege construction drawings and excel sheets over shiny photos. The first iteration, together with Frits van Dongen, Gerard Comello (Lingotto Development), Sergio M. Figueiredo (TU/e), Oana Radeş (Shift Architecture Urbanism) and Mariet Schoenmakers will use housing block The Whale in Amsterdam as lens to unpack how the shifts experienced in this era--including the deregulation and privatisation of the housing market--have directly shaped the conditions of contemporary practice of architecture.

Beyond the Cover approaches buildings as materialisation of a set of regulations, investments, and policies, making visible the political, economical and social relations constructed architecture embodies. From housing corporations to private public partnerships, from privatisation to procurement law, and from municipal politics to deregulation of architectural fees, the program will look into the architectural ideas, discourses, technologies, policies and subsidies that materialized in these built forms.

The 2000/2001 _Architecture in the Netherlands _yearbook was the last edition to feature a public housing project on its cover. _The Whale_, designed by Frits van Dongen with de Architecten Cie, is one of the three large-scale "meteorites" landed in a sea of low-rise suburban houses, as conceived in the masterplan of West8 for the former harbour area Borneo and Sporenburg in Amsterdam. The floor plans and sections of the Whale combine social housing, market-rent housing, and offices, and reveal a generosity and quality unprecedented in social housing today.

The event is preceded by an archival research into Het Nieuwe Instituut's State Archive for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning, as part of a research seminar taught by the _Curatorial Research Collective_ at TU/e's Chair of Architecture History and Theory. The seminar aims to understand and visualize the distance between the discourse associated with these buildings at the time of their construction and their contemporary status, expression, and use.

Before the Thursday Night you can grab a bite to eat with the speakers and staff of Het Nieuwe Instituut. At 18:00 Het Nieuwe Café will serve a light vegetarian meal. Dinner vouchers are available for ¬ 7.70 up to a day before the particular Thursday Night event via the Tickets link.

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