Netherlands Institute of Architecture

Rem Koolhaas – Netherlands Institute of Architecture, OMA, Architektuur instituut, Rotterdam-Nederland, 1988

The Netherlands Architecture Institute will house the national architectural archives, facilitate its scholars and display architectural objects in its museum to a wider audience.
The building consists of a comparison of a quadrangular podium – for activities requiring intimacy – in a triangular shape in order to generate the other elements of the program: exhibitions and library.
On top of this – closed – podium the auditorium, the reading room (connected to the archives) and the cafeteria. Around the podium to the east the entrance hall, to the north the permanent exhibitions and niches, to the west the changing exhibitions, to the south the library.

The triangular roof rests on thin steel columns. The podium symbolizes the “property” – collection and research – surrounded by spaces open to the public. Quadrilateral and triangle are parallel in front of the entrance, here is the central hall – a cavity in the podium – and here visitors are directed through separate paths.
Also on the podium was dug – following the general atrium – the auditorium, which widens into the system of ramps that eventually lead to the top of the podium. A mechanical yellow silk curtain can separate the auditorium. The podium is partly storage space – for models – and contains offices, research facilities, administration and editors of a review.
Our scheme places the archives – the very reason for the institute’s existence – in a tilted black concrete tower – perpendicular to the sloping roof – connected to a podium with workspaces around a light well.

Above the building a golden roof, towards the east green glass, north with corrugated fiberglass, south natural glass with external mechanical shades and gray glass around the light well. As the roof slopes, the diameter of the columns increases by three steps, the smallest are black, then gray and the highest white.
The institute shares the park site with the Rotterdam Art Museum (Boymans van Beuningen) and a building for large exhibitions (Art Center, designed by OMA); the sloping roof marks the transition from the Museum Park to the city.
Source: https://oma.eu/projects/netherlands-architecture-institute