Studio Banana TV

Ole Bouman, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI)

source: Studio Banana TV

Ole Bouman has been director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) since April 2007. Before taking up that position he was editor-in-chief of the periodical Volume, a cooperative venture of Stichting Archis, AMO (the research bureau of OMA/Rem Koolhaas) and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University. He has curated a series of public events for the reconstruction of the public domain in cities that have been hit by disasters, such as Ramallah, Mexico City, Beirut and Prishtina. Bouman has been lecturing Design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.

The Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) is more than a museum of architecture. It is above all a cultural institute which is open to the public and which uses a variety of methods for communicating about the shaping of human space. The NAI has one of the largest architecture collections in the world; eighteen kilometres of shelves containing drawings, sketches, models, photographs, books, journals and other materials. The NAI presents architecture, urban design, interior design and landscape architecture in more than twenty exhibitions it organizes every year. It also devotes a great deal of attention to developments in industrial and graphic design and other aspects of the designed environment. As a study center, the NAI generates many kinds of publication. NAI Publishers is an independent publishing house affiliated with the NAI. Some of its publications, such as exhibition catalogues, are linked to ongoing NAI activities.

Vacant NL, where architecture meets ideas, Venice Architecture Biennale 2010

Rietveld Landscape, the office appointed by the NAI to curate the Dutch presentation in Venice, decided to emphasize the vacancy of the pavilion during the architecture biennale. The exhibition is a call for the intelligent reuse of temporarily vacant buildings around the world in promoting creative enterprise. Thousands of buildings in the Netherlands lie vacant. Some of them for a week or a few months, many even for years. During the twelfth Venice Architecture Biennale, the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) and Rietveld Landscape will highlight the huge potential of all that temporarily unoccupied space.