Amsterdam, Netherlands

NHM

notes for a museum without a collection

assonometria egizia

1. NHM is a museum without a permanent collection. This condition needs to be understood as an opportunity, not as a want.

sezione longitudinale

2. A Museum without a permanent collection is something intimately empty. The hollowness of the Museum immediately suggests its possible urbanity. NHM is an open empty box waiting for aggressive metropolitan appropriation. Visitors can use NHM as a platform to explore and invade Dutch history.

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3. So far, the most precise urban version of a “metropolitan empty box” is a Roman forum. A forum is a large urban void protected by walls and porticoes; to the sides of the forum there are minor elements plugged in along the sides (temples, basilicas, and so on). The forum in itself is just a precinct. It has no function, it simply provides a precise frame formalizing the whatsoever happening inside. A forum is the formal infrastructure for the activities happening inside. It produces metropolitan intensity by defining a precise formal condition. It is nothing more than architecture. As such, it enables different possible programs and uses, yet maintaining a precise atmosphere.

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4. We propose to organize NHM as a forum, as a collection of rooms grouped along a major open-air room. The rooms offer different conditions and dimensions: a huge open air enclosure, a wide covered arcade (public zone), six large rooms for the different thematic areas introducing to small rooms related to the same theme (exhibition zone), and spaces for the conference, restaurants, shops and the administration. The different spaces define precise formal conditions that can react with the programs and the curatorial projects of the NHM. This set of spaces is entirely public and deliberately monumental. The architecture of NHM gives access to the media infrastructure that allows a private exploration of the Dutch history, and still will try to define a figure for the collective memory. If interactive media will multiply, fragment and sometimes dissolve Dutch history, architecture will take the risk to collect and compose a comprehensive figure and experience for the NHM. Architecture provides a clear sequence of spaces and a simple figure, and at the same time provides easy access to the tools that allow to be suspicious of this clarity.

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5. The set of different rooms is understood as the formal frame and as the infrastructure of NHM. Walls define spaces and display the museum content; pavements and ceilings contain cables and installations allowing the continuous re-organization of the exhibitions. The chronology of NHM is displayed along the walls of the forum, in a large, four-sided, interactive murales. Objects are accumulated in the open-air room, in the arcade and in the six large thematic rooms in mutating combinations. xxxxCranes move along the walls over the open air room, helping moving big objects inside the space and allowing staging concerts and spectacles. Installations in the floor in between the arcade and the main museum level allow continuous re-programming of the spaces below and above. The possibility to re-program the building and the exhibition almost on a daily bases provides the NHM with a festive atmosphere. The monumentality of the forum is complemented by the playful machinery that allows to populate the forum with a multitude of objects and events. Kids will stare at cranes moving around the colossal head of Spinoza and the first Dutch combined harvester.

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6. NHM needs to be in the city. The museum can perform its multiple tasks only if it works as a metropolitan stage, repeatedly invaded by populations, crowded with events, confronted with contemporary public life. NHM needs to be a stage for contemporary Dutch public life. As such, NHM needs the pressure of the city, the density of history, the dirt of humanity. As a forum, NHM will be able to be square, market, fair, concert hall, museum.

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Europaconcorsi Beta

NHM