Jaap Bakema Study CentreJaap Bakema Study Centre

With this year’s conference, the Jaap Bakema Study Centre celebrates its 10th anniversary and the centennial of the National Collection of Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning.

This year’s Jaap Bakema Study Centre conference revisits a broad topic: the digital. This time, the focus is on the vast amount of data that is generated and stored.

The Jaap Bakema Study Centre conference explores ethnography's influence on architecture. Since the 19th century, architects have used ethnography - a form of research in which immersion in a community allows observers to closely study behaviours and interactions - to develop the discipline and reshape the architect's social role.

This year's Jaap Bakema Study Centre conference aims to critically explore the interplay between architecture and digital culture since the 1970s. How has the emergent data society materialised in architecture? What new typologies have been developed? And what role did architecture play in the emerging discussion about artificial intelligence?

This year's international conference of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre focuses on the years 1965 to 1989, in which welfare state arrangements were contested on both left and right, by counterculture movements and the rise of populism. While government institutions sought a proper response, urban renewal and city repair became a new field of work for architects and planners.

The 2018 edition of the annual conference of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre is dedicated to Aldo and Hannie van Eyck. In honour of their achievements and as a celebration of their work, the conference aims to bring together scholars and practitioners to explore the rich legacy of their ideas and aspirations for a humanist architecture.

For its Fourth Annual Conference, the Jaap Bakema Study Centre hosted the fifth thematic conference of the European Architecture History Network, The Tools of the Architect, in collaboration with the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of TU Delft. The conference was held between November 22-24, 2017. On the afternoon of November 23, the conference moved to Het Nieuwe Instituut, where a series of paper sessions and a keynote lecture by Michiel Riedijk took place.

For its third annual conference, the Jaap Bakema Study Centre aimed to look more closely into new developments in architectural drawing, specifically the cross-pollination between the media of paper and pixels.

For its second annual conference The Jaap Bakema Study Centre wanted to take a closer look at the relationship between research and the exhibition medium. Curators, researchers and designers from various international institutes discussed the way knowledge production, innovation and exhibition design are interrelated.

The Jaap Bakema Study Centre organised a special conference on the work of Jaap Bakema (1914-1981) and his idea to build towards an open society. Speakers included professor Tom Avermaete, professor Carola Hein (both TU Delft), professor Mark Swenarton (University of Liverpool) and Christoph Grafe, director of the Flemish Architecture Institute (VAi). The conference acted as a conclusion to the Dutch presentation for this year's Venice Biennale Open: A Bakema Celebration.