MVRDVHNI: The Living Archive of a Studio
Het Nieuwe Instituut
Curation*
November, 2021
Het Nieuwe Instituut
Curation*
November, 2021
The exhibition displays the MVRDV archive as a living entity in office spaces, rather than in museum galleries. As a working environment, the office is the place where ideas and projects move fluidly back and forth between present, past, and future. Comprising their first 400 projects, the MVRDV archive was acquired in 2015 by the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning at Het Nieuwe Instituut. It stretches across 76 metres of shelves and includes drawings, sketches, models, correspondence, photographs, and magazines – but also 3.62 TB of digital data. All have stories to tell. For this exhibition, we invited some of the less visible collaborators of MVRDV to share their recollections. From clients and engineers to former employees and interns, these recorded oral histories will join the archive and, thus, the writing of the firm's history.
*with Marten Kuijpers, Suzanne Mulder, and MVRDV (Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, and Nathalie de Vries). Design by Geoff Han. Project lead Daphne van Schaijk. Photos by Johannes Schwartz.





