 Aaron Betsky, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, was curator of Architecture, Design and Digital Projects at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1995 to 2001. He is active as a writer on design, serves frequently as a critic and competition juror, and has taught at several universities in the U.S. Among his publications on architecture and design are Landscrapers, Architecture Must Burn, Violated Perfection: Architecture and the Fragmentation of the Modern, and critical studies of Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind.
Brief description of the presentation:
"Why Dutch Design Will Save You"
In the last few decades, the Dutch have developed a way of making objects, spaces, buildings and cities that offer specific strategies with which we can design for a world that to many of us appears to be more and more out of control. The Dutch know how to make (social) housing that is affordable, laid out with intelligence and care, and can be aggregated to make livable communities. They know how to plan for sprawl. They know how to make objects that do not succumb to fashion and the desire for the always new, but show us how to re-use and re-think our existing situation. They create buildings whose excitement comes from the intelligent combination of images and functions, instead of out of their stylist reductionism or expressive and excessive form-making. In all these ways, the Dutch have much to contribute to urban and suburban culture around the world.
To a certain extent, these lessons come out of peculiarities of Dutch history, such as the artificial nature of the landscape, the dense patterns of habitation, and a history of social action around the issue of housing. But the Dutch have also engaged in an active, government-supported and -managed program to support good architecture, design and urbanism. This program is also worth examining and can serve as an example. This talk will show examples of recent Dutch architecture and design, analyze their genesis and implications, and try to point out what we can learn from these objects, spaces and urban environments, as well as from the programs that support their creation. |
