About

The Institute for Ordinariness and Light is a place to work and think. Acting as an avatar office for the not so visible acts of research and writing it presents the work of Dirk van den Heuvel. Main interests of the Institute for Ordinariness and Light concern architecture and urban planning, in particular the sites of the home and the city as constructions of everyday practices, where the effects of modernisation, technology, fashion and media are consistently being negotiated, absorbed, transformed and re-directed. The Institute for Ordinariness and Light preferably operates within various networks, establishing collaborations with partners sharing the same affinities and aspirations. By necessity, its way of procedure is full of elegantly improvised poetics.

Dirk van den Heuvel works as an architect, writer and curator based in Amsterdam. He is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft.

Book publications include 'Lessons: Tupker / Risselada. A Double Portrait of Dutch Architectural Education 1953-2003', (SUN Publishers, Amsterdam 2003, together with Madeleine Steigenga and Jaap van Triest), and 'Team 10 - in Search of a Utopia of the Present 1953-1981' (NAi Publishers, Rotterdam 2005, together with Max Risselada).
He was an editor of the independent architectural journal OASE (1993-1999). He is now editor of DASH - Delft Architectural Studies on Housing, a publication series of the chair of Architecture & Dwelling, TU Delft and NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, as well as a member of the editorial board of the online published Delft School of Design journal Footprint for architectural theory.
Together with Max Risselada he curated the exhibition Alison and Peter Smithson - from the House of the Future to a house of today for the London Design Museum, after which it travelled to various places in Europe. A catalogue of the same name was published with 010 Publishers, Rotterdam.
At the invitation of Guus Beumer, director of NAiM/Bureau Europa in Maastricht, Dirk van den Heuvel curated the exhibition Changing Ideals - Re-thinking the House.

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