National History Museum

The Berlage Institute, in collaboration with the National History Museum, invited three European architecture offices—51N4E, baukuh, and Monadnock—to participate in a study assignment to develop architectural concepts for a new museum dedicated to the national history of the Netherlands. The resulting three studies suggest possible relations between public space and sites for the narration of Dutch history.

Over the past three decades, the major public museum has become an essential component of urban infrastructure. Museums no longer only conserve and present a public or private collection, as they predominately did in the nineteenth century, but now also actively attract and host visitors in search of experiences. The museum of the twenty-first century has become a truly public destination and this quality has altered the role of museum architecture. Not only does a museum need space to display its collection, but its architecture is also, now, at least as much defined by the public spaces of circulation, consumption, and rest distributed throughout the building.

The National History Museum—a museum without a collection—is to become one of these places of mass cultural experience. Within the Netherlands, the choice of a location for the National History Museum is a controversial issue as demonstrated by the stream of articles, interviews, and opinions in the Dutch press. The intensity of this public debate demonstrates the museum is regarded as a major benefit to a city's attractiveness.

The commissioned architectural studies do not propose an exhibition layout, a curatorial program, or speculate on the museum building's potential role in its direct environment. They instead explore how the architecture of the National History Museum might orchestrate a balanced interaction between history and its visitors, without reducing the museum exclusively to a place of either education or entertainment. Sketched from the inside out to reflect on the relation of various publics with displayed works, these studies are designed to connect the museum's public spaces with the exhibition spaces themselves.

The accompanying images, drawings, and model photographs explore how mass culture and its history can be translated spatially and how this translation can be accomplished through and within the museum building's organization. Rather than an attempt to design iconic architecture, these three studies point to the core spatial challenges for this new museum.

Parallel to the development of these studies, the Berlage Institute also conducted a postgraduate design-research studio entitled "Hi_Story." The studio explored how the curatorial and programmatic requirements of the museum could be translated into architecture, ways in which the museum building can interact with the public sphere, and methods for mobilizing material from existing museum collections in the Netherlands for exhibitions. Complementary to the study assignment and the postgraduate studio, the Berlage Institute hosted a series of public lectures and seminars devoted to history of the museum and to examples of contemporary museum architecture worldwide.

In February of 2011, the publisher SUN Architecture—in cooperation with the National History Museum and the Berlage Institute—released a publication, entitled Sketches for a National History Museum, containing the three studies, a selection of the postgraduate studio work, and texts by architectural historian Kenneth Frampton and architecture critic Hans Ibelings.
Joachim Declerck and Salomon Frausto
Berlage Institute
*This text has been adapted from the epilogue to Sketches for a National History Museum.