The Berlage pays tribute to architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen (1949–2023), a long-time friend and collaborator, who will be greatly missed. He most recently held a visiting professorship, from September 2020 to January 2021, at the TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, and previously chaired the Berlage’s program committee. On display is “Twelve Imaginary Cities,” a set of illustrative plates resulting from a design-research assignment he taught; and “An Architecture of Section: Seven Interpretive Models,” a set of model-objects our students contributed to “Constructed Geographies: Paulo Mendes da Rocha” exhibition, curated by Jean-Louis and Vanessa Grossman.

The Berlage is pleased to announced its contribution, entitled to “An Architecture of Section: Seven Interpretive Models,” to the exhibition “Constructed Geographies: Paulo Mendes da Rocha.” Fourteen international students delved into Paulo Mendes de Rocha’s archives to produce a comparative series of model-objects that analyze seven of his buildings. They explored the structural geometry of each building and the respective connections of sky and ground, of man to space, of interior to exterior, of form to matter, of culture to geography. This work was completed as part of the “Architecture, Nature, and the Americas: The Work of Paulo Mendes da Rocha” proseminar taught by Vanessa Grossman in spring 2023 at the Berlage.

Photo credit: Jesse Verdoes for the Berlage

This spring semester, speakers include Guy Nordenson, Office Winhov, Dyvik Kahlen, Alice Bucknell, Studio MNM, Luis Fernandez-Galiano, and Adamo-Faiden.

The lecture is avalable online at theberlage.nl/archive

The Berlage is pleased to announce its upcoming theory master class entitled “Ways of Worlding” led by Alice Bucknell with contributions by Lawrence Lek, Sahej Rahal, and Elvia Wilk. What is a world and how is it made? How can the creative and critical practice of worldbuilding help us imagine alternative visions for the present and future worlds to come? In this two-week-long masterclass, North American artist and writer Alice Bucknell will introduce participants to multiple narrative and aesthetic strategies for making worlds, traversing architecture, ecology, technology, philosophy, magic, game engines, and collaborations with artificial intelligence. The two weeks will be complemented by a series of public lectures and will conclude with a public event and exhibition on Friday, April 21.

Fashion House is a collective thesis project anticipating an alternative future for the fashion industry in five emerging European fashion centers in and around Berlin, Marseille, Rotterdam, Valencia, and Zurich.

Click here to visit the exhibition

River Atlas culminates the fall 2023 incarnation of the Berlage’s long-standing Project NL course organized in collaboration with TU Delft Library and Allmaps. An attempt to understand the river landscapes of the Netherlands—not as givens but rather products of complex sets of decisions, negotiations, aspirations, and at times arbitrary events—it traces broader historical shifts such as the Enlightenment’s effort to engineer nature, moments of hesitation, and gradual aspirations for coexistence.

River Atlas will be exhibited in the Department of Architecture corridor, located on the first floor of the TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment’s eastern wing, from Tuesday, January 31 to Wednesday, March 1.

For the River Atlas, The Berlage collaborated with Allmaps, a platform of open source tools for curating, georeferencing and exploring digitized maps. Allmaps works on the basis of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), which is implemented by an increasing number of libraries and archives worldwide in order to share their digital collections

http://riveratlas.theberlage.nl

Together the collective projects Travel Agency, Supermarket, and Fashion House explore the spatial implications of the three largest global industries: tourism, food, and fashion; they speculate on contemporary architecture's capacity to push the boundaries of material cultures and natural resources.

The contribution is part of the exhibition FUTURE GENERATION in the Keilezaal which showcases a group of young design practitioners representing the promise for a hopeful future, both in the short-term and in the long run.

www.iabr.nl

The Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment is pleased to announce its contribution, entitled The Auto Drives Architecture, to the exhibition “Motion. Autos, Art, Architecture," curated by the Norman Foster Foundation and held at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao from April 8 to September 18, 2022.

How will the future car transform the architecture associated with twentieth–century highways and interchanges, from gas stations and car washes to parking garages and motels? What new types of architecture will emerge alongside the future car in the second half of the twenty-first century? How will the private space of the car continue to merge with the public realm?

In fall 2020, Jean-Louis Cohen taught the proseminar “Territories of Intertextuality: A Transurban Perspective on City Form." Since ancient times, cities have never ceased observing each other, as patterns and structures have been displaced across borders and oceans. The seminar considered how most large cities contain fragments borrowed from others: Roman layouts have shaped Versailles and St. Petersburg, while “little Parises” have proliferated in Latin America or the Balkans.

The films produced during the 2021 theory master class led by Bêka & Lemoine are now available online at ajourneyroundmyroom-theberlage.nl. The master class explored the unprecedented proximity and familiarity we have with our daily domestic environments in the wake of the successive lockdowns. Revisiting Xavier de Maistre’s eccentric 1794 novel entitled "A Journey Round My Room," one of the first examples of a literature of confinement, participants investigated film as way to bring to experience, understanding, and narration of space that other kinds of representational media—such as plans, sections, elevations, or photographs—cannot.

Photo by Juan Benavides.