Het Nieuwe Instituut

The squatting movement has played a major role in the design of the urban fabric and domestic interior, and continues to propose alternatives to dominant, market-oriented housing policies. Architecture of Appropriation acknowledges squatting as an architectural practice. The project analyzes six locations in the Netherlands through architectural drawings, interviews, and archival material to build up a record of past and current struggles, spaces, and oral histories, forming the basis for a new acquisition policy for the State Archive for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning. The project brings the expertise of the squatting movement together with architects, archivists, scholars, and lawyers, to discuss approaches to the research, archival practices and representation of precarious, non-author-based, and often criminalized spatial practices in the institutional framework of an archive and museum.