Virtual CIAM MuseumVirtual CIAM Museum

The Remote Fieldwork exercise aims to connect the architectural projects in the National Collection housed at the Nieuwe Instituut with a field survey of the actual built spaces. Behind this is the wish to reconnect the archive with the city, so to speak, linking the spaces of ideas to those of lived reality. It then becomes possible to tell a story about the original design intentions, the architectural design and its media, as well as the afterlives of the built projects.

The Lijnbaan was heralded as a triumph of modernist architectural planning, celebrated by the urban theorist Lewis Mumford and others. Today the Lijnbaan is listed as a national monument, having been through several cycles of renovation.

To further probe the special qualities and conditions of the Lijnbaan, the Rotterdam shopping street is contrasted with a similar project in Johannesburg, South Africa: the Small Street shopping mall. Density, demography and socio-economic conditions could not be more different, yet the Small Street shopping mall displays typological traits similar to Rotterdam’s Lijnbaan – in particular, the idea of a pedestrianised street which connects a series of urban blocks.

To compare the two shopping streets, archival materials have been combined with social media technologies, including smart-phone footage of street films and interviews. Here, the remote aspect becomes crucial: proxy researchers were sent out to the actual site to make films and talk to visitors. Bing van der Meer, an architecture student at TU Delft originally from Rotterdam, and Johannesburg architect Siwe Mathenjwa did the fieldwork. The first results, a collection of these combined visits, films and reflections, are published here.

Jhono Bennett is the co-founder of 1to1 – Agency of Engagement, a design-led social enterprise based in Johannesburg. His practice-led research interests are driven by the issues of inclusive design approaches, spatial justice, critical positionality, and urban planning in South African cities. Bennett is a PhD candidate at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. His research forms part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie project TACK, Communities of Tacit Knowledge: Architecture and its Ways of Knowing, coordinated by the ETH Zurich, and included a secondment at the Nieuwe Instituut.

Remote Fieldwork is a project by Jhono Bennett, realised as part of the EU-sponsored project TACK: Communities of Tacit Knowledge in Architecture, in collaboration with Dirk van den Heuvel and the Jaap Bakema Study Centre.