Jaap Bakema Study Centre
The Jaap Bakema Study Centre is a collaborative project of the Nieuwe Instituut and the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of TU Delft. It initiates and undertakes research projects that result in exhibitions, publications, and public events, often in collaboration with third parties and within international networks. The Jaap Bakema Study Centre combines contemporary social issues with fundamental research and knowledge development in the field of the creative industry: design, culture and society.
Directed by Dirk van den Heuvel and coordinated by Stef Dingen, the Jaap Bakema Study Centre facilitates and generates research by, and in collaboration with, other cultural and academic institutions.
Advisory Board
The Jaap Bakema Study Centre academic advisory board consists of Tom Avermaete (ETH Zürich), Hetty Berens (Nieuwe Instituut), Maristella Casciato (Getty Research Institute), Carola Hein (TU Delft) and Georg Vrachliotis (TU Delft). Previously, Laurent Stalder (ETH Zürich) served as a board member.
Visiting Scholars
Within the Visiting Scholars programme, the Jaap Bakema Study Centre welcomes guest researchers who participate in the four research and museum projects: Structuralism, the Open Society, Total Space and Museology.
Two Margarita Salas Postdoctoral Fellows Paula Lacomba (since 2021) and Elena Martínez Millana (since 2022) are working on Herman Hertzberger and OMA Archives at the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning. Lacomba and Martínez Millana gave lectures on Dutch Architecture and Welfare State at TU Delft in April 2023. As a part of Erasmus staff training mobility, İmran Gümüş visited the JBSC for her research revolving around the notion of habitat in the spring of 2023.
Alejandro Campos Uribe has been affiliated on the basis of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship between (2021-2023). Giovanni Bellotti and Alessandra Covini (Studio Ossidiana) worked on the research installation Animal Encounters (2019).
In 2017, the Jaap Bakema Study Centre welcomed Maarten Gielen and Lionel DeVlieger from Rotor in Brussels as visiting professors, creating a research studio on the reuse of heritage and structuralist architecture.
JBSC’s guest researchers also include Professor Georges Teyssot (Université de Laval), Professor M. Christine Boyer (Princeton University) and Professor Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen (Yale University). Christine Boyer delivered the public lecture Open Societies, Common Spaces and Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen gave a public seminar around new developments in exhibitions. As one of the first born-digital researchers, Dr. Xavier van Rooyen (Liege) worked with the digital archive of MVRDV at the Nieuwe Instituut and gave a seminar entitled “MVRDV’s Collage Aesthetic or the Ambition of a Collective Design Authorship” at TU Delft during his visit to the Jaap Bakema Study in 2022.
The Critical Visitor
Nieuwe Instituut is a partner within the NWO The Critical Visitor project that investigates how heritage institutions can bring about new forms of inclusiveness and accessibility through their organisation, collections and exhibition policy. The five-year research project is being conducted by a consortium of fifteen cultural and scientific institutions.
TACK Network
Communities of Tacit Knowledge: Architecture and its Ways of Knowing, or simply TACK, is an Innovative Training Network as part of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions within the European Horizon 2020 Framework Programme. This international research project aims to gain a better understanding of the often implicit experiential knowledge which architects draw on when designing buildings and cities. TACK is formed by ten European academic institutions, three leading cultural institutions for architecture, and nine leading architectural firms. These partners jointly offer an innovative PhD training programme in the field of tacit knowledge in architecture, resulting in ten parallel PhD projects.
PhD Architecture and Democracy
Together with the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft, the Jaap Bakema Study Centre launched the PhD programme Architecture and Democracy. The programme seeks to investigate how over the course of the 20th century, architecture and urban planning have played a role in representing, embodying and enabling democracy. Current PhD candidates are Íñigo Cornago Bonal and Burcu Köken.
Bakema Fellowship
In the years 2006-2012 the precursor organisation of Het Nieuwe Instituut, the Netherlands Architecture institute, hosted the Bakema Fellowship programme. Fellows were Jessica Bridger, Elena Cabrera Vacas, Dietmar Koering, Thomas Kong, Ismae’l Sheikh Hassan and Tim de Boer.