IABR 2024: Nature of Hope
The main venue for this year’s International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) will be the Nieuwe Instituut – the very place where, more than 20 years ago, the biennale began its growth into an international platform for developments in architecture and urban planning. The Nature of Hope exhibition explores how architecture can restore ecological balance by taking biodiversity and nature as a starting point for design. Hope is seen as the driving force for change.
This year's IABR programme consists of three complementary expressions: the exhibition at the Nieuwe Instituut, a green route across the city of Rotterdam, and a public programme. Visit IABR's website to plan your visit.
Interplay of nature, culture and hope
This year’s biennale edition, themed Nature of Hope, is put forward by IABR Director Saskia van Stein and curated by Janna Bystrykh, Catherine Koekoek, Hani Salih, Alina Paias and Noortje Weenink. The curatorial team explores how spacial design could contribute to safeguard human existence on our planet and foster a metabolic relationship with ecological processes and local material cultures.
They look at what it takes to approach the interplay of nature, culture and hope through spatial design, using hope as a driving force for social change. These efforts range from nature protective laws to stewardship activities to protect and restore wildlife, biodiversity and natural habitats. What are the building blocks of an emphatically hopeful way of architectural thinking, designing and building that can serve all life on the planet?
About IABR
More than 20 years after the first edition was held in the then NAi, the biennial returns to its roots in the Museumpark, and the building where it began its growth into the international platform for developments in architecture and urban planning that it is today.
“The IABR and the Nieuwe Instituut share an agenda in which design disciplines have a role to play in interpreting and driving developments in urgent social challenges,” says IABR’s Director Saskia van Stein.
As a knowledge and culture institution, the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) stimulates and draws attention to the value of design research. The disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning have an essential, unifying and representative role in the drastic societal changes that the world is facing as a result of the climate crisis. Visualising alternatives is crucial in shaping a shared future.
For more information about the IABR and Nature of Hope, please visit the biennial’s website.
This project was made possible thanks to:
