Process
The journey started in 2019 when we presented The Growing Pavilion, which won several awards. In 2020, we started a living lab, collaborative and open-source research that resulted in two expo installations. First of all, The Exploded View – Methods & Materials (2020): a house pulled apart, scale 1:4, shows how we want to rethink the realisation of a home radically. In 2021 we took it a step further with The Exploded View – Beyond Building. It became an iconic exhibition in the form of a house that consists entirely of biobased materials, circular construction methods and stories about its part in the changing value chain. The Exploded View – Beyond Building can be seen at Floriade Expo 2022 (April 14 – October 9, 2022) in Almere. Walls made of algae, home-grown vegetables on the wall and a kitchen made from leftover food; this life-size biobased house stimulates all your senses and shows you the circular future.
Beyond Building
It goes beyond construction; we need a completely new value system. The old system doesn’t change easily; we should no longer always focus on more, bigger and better, but on cyclical thinking. With more attention to nature and – hopefully – less inequality. We examine four themes intending to change the system: health, agriculture, neighbourhoods of the future and the value system.
We include professionals and the general public in our search results. We tell what we have discovered and what we do not know yet. And we invite everyone to brainstorm and participate. To change the conversation from “is this possible?” to “how are we going to do this well together?”. In this way, we are evolving towards revaluating what we value.
2022 & 2023: Taking a moment and looking ahead
2022 will be a year in which we, as the Embassy, assess the state of affairs in relation to the change in the value system. Which new perspectives have arisen, which may have already been used, and which need acceleration? We are getting down to business and setting the tone for the coming years with a programmed exhibition and meetings.
At the same time, the Embassy is starting a new living Lab: Possible Landscapes. It’s clear that those of us in the Netherlands want to move towards a more sustainable and circular living environment. That’s great, but how do you do that, and what does that actually mean? What impact does this have on how we renovate, build up and tear down? How do we grow and harvest? How are we housed and live? How do we create a sustainable, circular living environment for people and nature? On a larger landscape scale and what might this look like? There is no one answer to that. In 2022 and 2023, we will look for answers to these questions, which we want to show and experience in a new, modular exhibition about tomorrow’s (Dutch) living environment, which we will present starting in 2023.
