The Berlage

Project Global: The Logistics of Cork and Fish
Proseminar Part 1
Proseminar Part 2
Thesis Development
The Berlage Sessions

Project NL: Coast Atlas
City Atlas is the second iteration of the Berlage’s long-standing Project NL design-research course in collaboration with Allmaps and the TU Delft library. The project is arranged in three parts. The first part focuses on collecting, categorizing, and annotating archival materials to compile a comprehensive dossier on the spatial changes of the respective sites. The second part analyzes and translates the transformations into synthetic drawings, developing arguments that either affirm, broaden or complement a common historical narrative of each site. The third part summarizes the findings by delivering a physical exhibition, a digital application, and a final event. A course led by Juan Benavides, Sanne van den Breemer, Salomon Frausto, and Jules Schoonman.

http://cityatlas.theberlage.nl

Proseminar Part 1: "Voices of the Recent Past" led by Léa-Catherine Szacka
The six-part proseminar “Voices of the Recent Past” led by Léa-Catherine Szacka will focus on conversations and oral history as methodological and research tools. In architecture, the period spanning the mid-1960s to the early 1990s is generally characterised by an intense production of discourse. The proseminar will trace the production of these discourses by unveiling evidences and listening to the voices of its protagonists.

Proseminar Part 2: "Strategies in Architectural Thinking" led by Olaf Gipser
The six-part proseminar “Strategies in Architectural Thinking” taught by Olaf Gipser is framed by the hypothesis that architecture is predominantly a form of cultural reflection and expression that ultimately addresses the most profound assumptions and questions concerning human existence.

The Berlage Sessions: About the Book
The Berlage Sessions, a seven-part seminar series entitled “About the Book,” examines recent scholarship and their respective book production, from building biographies and academic anthologies to memoirs and novels. Topics will include El Lissitzky’s project for a “horizontal skyscraper,” a meditative tour of a family’s house on the Sardinian Coast, an account of the life and work of the architect Minoru Yamasaki, the role of modernism and material culture played in the aspiring Black American middle class of the early twentieth century, a critical-paranoid investigation of the paradoxes of OMA’s enigmatic Villa Dall’Ava, the emergence of world histories of architecture, and the tenuous relationship of eighteenth-century England to late-capitalist modernity through the lives and times of ceramics entrepreneur Josiah Wedgewood. The series will conclude with a reflection on how and for whom is architectural history is written.

Research Colloquium
During the Research Colloquium, led by Salomon Frausto, students will examine the relation between form and content in architectural discourse. Through a series of workshops with leading and emerging scholars, graphic designers, filmmakers, and editors, students will get introduced to the Berlage’s Manuel of Style, Working Set, and other ways of working that will be used in the curriculum.

Design Master Class: "Unfinished Building" led by Dyvik Kahlen
A building is never really finished, always remaining subject to change. While buildings are - or should be! - made to last, people and lifestyles develop and change: buildings are reused in different ways; worn-down materials are replaced with others; doors, windows, and walls are added and altered. This cycle most likely happens over and over again. Master class participants will explore building proposals of unfinished and adaptable nature by making large, crude timber models in scale 1:25. The fortnight will be complemented by a public lecture and site visits, concluding with a public event and exhibition on Friday, November 17.

Project Thesis: The Hotel

Project Global: The Logistics of Marble and Olives
The second iteration of a multi-year thematic, this spring the Berlage’s longstanding Project Global engages with how logistics shapes the built environment. Urged by recent disruptions in global supply chains and related tendencies towards deglobalization, students will explore contemporary shifts in the global production and distribution networks, and their spatial implications. The course bases its investigation in the European Union, looking at the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) it has defined to strengthen its internal market, as well as global networks of trade and transportation. Students will look at chains from—newly sourced or recycled—raw materials to manufactured products, and their afterlife. From the site of cultivation or extraction, along the way to how and where a product reaches the consumer, they will investigate all the storage, transportation, transshipment, and material handling facilities. After looking at Estonia within the North Sea–Baltic Corridor in the first iteration of the course, this year the focus will be on Greece as part of the European Orient–East Med (OEM) Corridor, and the Chinese Maritime Silk Road (MSR).

Proseminar Part 1: Her Office led by Amy Thomas with Ollie Palmer
Using an intersectional approach, this seminarasks: to what extent gender roles have been articulated inoffice design since 1950, and how has this affected workplaceparity? Through the analysis of texts and films,the seminar explores how technology, work cultures andmanagement theory, interconnect with design standardsand norms in furniture, spatial planning, and architecture,and the ways in which these universalisms reinforcedgendered divisions of labour. It also examines howembedded cultures of discrimination in both the designfield and the corporate world resulted in the underrepresentationof women on both sides the design-commissioningprocess: offices were largely designed by men, for men.

Proseminar Part 2: Spaces through Colonial Objects led by Rachel Lee

Theory Master Class: "Why Le Corbusier?" led by Tim Benton
The master class, to be held from Monday, April 15 to Friday, April 26, will explore and interrogate Le Corbusier’s texts, his lectures, his buildings, his paintings and decorative works, and will ask participants to use their imagination to build a creative response that confronts selected topics, problems, and controversies. The two-week-long program will be complemented by lectures and discussions with international guests, and be concluded with a public event and exhibition in the Orange Room on Friday, April 26.

Thesis Development: The Anatomy of The Medical Complex

The Berlage Sessions: In and Out of Scale
The Berlage Sessions is a thematic seven-part seminar series focusing on scholarly research and critical approaches to the history and theory of architecture and urban design. This spring 2024 series, entitled “In and Out of Scale,” examines select ideas and projects that reconsider the scalar relationships of the built environment, from radio transmission and television broadcasting to the model and the chair.

Project NL: River Atlas
Project NL is the Berlage’s long-standing design-research project that seeks to examine global phenomena in the Netherlands in order to gain a more precise understanding of their local spatial consequences. Through a series of exercises designed to equip them with skills, instruments, and methodologies (required to thrive at the Berlage), students will look at the design of the Dutch river landscape and the shifting perspective from agriculture to ecology, from rationalization to renaturalization. Working with an open source digital platform to relate map

http://riveratlas.theberlage.nl

Proseminar Part 1: "Voices of the Recent Past" led by Léa-Catherine Szacka
The six-part proseminar “Voices of the Recent Past” led by Léa-Catherine Szacka will focus on conversations and oral history as methodological and research tools. In architecture, the period spanning the mid-1960s to the early 1990s is generally characterised by an intense production of discourse. The proseminar will trace the production of these discourses by unveiling evidences and listening to the voices of its protagonists.

Proseminar Part 2: "Strategies in Architectural Thinking" led by Olaf Gipser
The six-part proseminar “Strategies in Architectural Thinking” taught by Olaf Gipser is framed by the hypothesis that architecture is predominantly a form of cultural reflection and expression that ultimately addresses the most profound assumptions and questions concerning human existence.

The Berlage Sessions: Architecture's Transpositions
The Berlage Sessions is a thematic seven-part seminar series focusing on scholarly research and critical approaches to the history and theory of architecture and urban design. This fall’s series, entitled “Architecture’s Transpositions,” explores the transfers between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality, from sixteen-century abstracted geometries to twentieth-first-century augmented realities. Topics will include the digitization of maps, the creation of digital replicas of landscapes, the modeling of multisensory extended reality experiences, the framing and photographing of buildings, and imagined histories of architectural drawings and models.

Research Colloquium
During the Research Colloquium, led by Salomon Frausto, students will examine the relation between form and content in architectural discourse. Through a series of workshops with leading and emerging scholars, graphic designers, filmmakers, and editors, students will get introduced to the Berlage’s Manuel of Style, Working Set, and other ways of working that will be used in the curriculum. Complementary, Stephan Petermann will lead a workshop on architectural criticism, where students will learn how to review a building, book, object, play, movie, exhibition,  or biennale. The result will ultimately contribute to a forthcoming edition of the magazine Volume.

Design Master Class: "We wrote a master plan, on a piece of paper, but we lost it" led by Harrison & Wood
A design master class led by Bristol-based duo John Wood and Paul Harrison. Throughout the two weeks students will explore ideas of space, performance, composition, comedy, and movement, which manifest themselves in four films, four structures, and four manifestos.

Project Thesis: Fashion House

Project Global: The Logistics of Milk and Timber
Project Global, engages with logistics, and the way this shapes the environment. Urged by recent disruptions in global supply chains and related tendencies towards deglobalization, it aims to explore contemporary shifts in the global production and distribution networks. The project bases its investigation in the European Union, and the current Core Network Corridors it has defined to strengthen its internal market. Focusing each year on one corridor, it explores regional roles within cross-national supply chains, and the ways these are affected by policy and planning. Students will look at chains from raw materials to manufactured products—located fully or partially within the territories of study—and all the storage, transportation, transhipment and material handling facilities along the way from the site of production (or extraction) to the consumer. They will study rail, road, sea and air transportation routes, and the intermodal hubs that connect them. From the targets and strategies for the reduction of transport related carbon emissions, to strategic autonomy policies and the reshoring of production, the work will engage with contemporary developments that affect the logistics landscape and its spaces. Exploring the design questions that follow from these developments, students will ultimately project a set of architectural projects that address the future of the infrastructure, buildings and objects that form part of our logistics environment. Led by Sanne van den Breemer, Juan Benavides, Benjamin Groothuijse, and Salomon Frausto.

Proseminar Part 1: "Architecture, Nature, and the Americas" led by Vanessa Grossman
Current debates on the built environment in relation to the Anthropocene narrative as a new geological era have triggered calls in the global North for “No New Buildings,” the denunciation of a “Carbon Modernity” and “toxic urbanisms.” These cries demand a critical assessment of globalization, sovereignty, modernization, and modernism, particularly in relation to what we now call global South, which is one of the last refuges of biodiversity on the planet in the era of climate change, and where millions remain homeless and lack access to the most basic infrastructure. The concept of the Anthropocene poses crucial questions of accountability and equity: Latin American and African countries have contributed very little to the present environmental crisis. These tendencies translate into an indistinctive calling into question of building techniques, materials, and technologies such as reinforced concrete, and other achievements of modernization and modern architecture, as if they were widespread in all parts of the world. Led by Vanessa Grossman, with the participation of Jean-Louis Cohen.

Proseminar Part 2: "Her Office" led by Amy Thomas with Ollie Palmer
Using an intersectional approach, this seminarasks: to what extent gender roles have been articulated inoffice design since 1950, and how has this affected workplaceparity? Through the analysis of texts and films,the seminar explores how technology, work cultures andmanagement theory, interconnect with design standardsand norms in furniture, spatial planning, and architecture,and the ways in which these universalisms reinforcedgendered divisions of labour. It also examines howembedded cultures of discrimination in both the designfield and the corporate world resulted in the underrepresentationof women on both sides the design-commissioningprocess: offices were largely designed by men, for men.

Theory Master Class: "Ways of Worlding" led by Alice Bucknell
Each spring the Berlage organizes a two-week master class led by a renowned architectural thinker. This year’s iteration is entitled ”Ways of Worlding" will be 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. Led by Alice Bucknell, with contributions by Lawrence Lek, Sahej Rahal, and Elvia Wilk.

Thesis Development

The Berlage Sessions: Money Talks
The Berlage Sessions is a thematic seven-part seminar series focusing on scholarly research and critical approaches to the history and theory of architecture and urban design. This spring’s series, entitled “Money Talks,” looked at the architecture associated with the storing, trading, management, digitization, and centralization of money. Speakers will include Daniel M. Abramson, Herman van Bergeijk, Martin Gran, Carol Patterson, Lauren S. Weingarden, Amy Thomas, and Stephanie Williams.