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F.A. and A. Warners. Block of flats. NAi Collection / WARN
The NAI keeps and cares for roughly 500 archives and individual collections created by Dutch architects, urban designers, professional associations and training institutes. They date from the period 1850 - 1980. Our goal has always been to collect complete archives. Besides museum quality drawings, you also find sketches, preliminary designs, working drawings, business and personal correspondence, photographs, models, collections of press clippings, and published articles.
The archives of the firm P.J.H. Cuypers and his son J.Th. Cuypers, and the archive of Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Bouwkunst (Society for the Promotion of Architecture) are prominent 19th century components of the NAI collection. The main bulk of the collection is from the period 1900 to 1940, and includes the archives of H.P. Berlage, K.P.C. de Bazel, W. Kromhout, M. de Klerk, J.J.P. Oud, W.M. Dudok, J. Duiker, J.A. Brinkman and L.C. van der Vlugt, T. van Doesburg, H. Th. Wijdeveld, G. Th. Rietveld and C. van Eesteren.
Another important archive from the same period is that of the Royal Institute of Dutch Architects (BNA). The postwar reconstruction period (1940-1965) is well represented by the archives of J.H. van den Broek and J.B. Bakema, H. Maaskant, and W. Wissing. More recent archives include those of T. Bosch, M. van Schijndel and the early work of OMA. Among the most recent acquisitions are the project files of the AM NAI Architecture Prize, a prize for the best building by an architect under the age of forty.
> Searching the collection
The NAI was formed in 1988 by a merger of The Stichting
Architectuurmuseum, the Nederlands Documentatiecentrum voor de
Bouwkunst, and Stichting Wonen. These three organizations placed their
collections in the care of the new institute. The history of the
collection however, goes much further back.
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The NAI archives comprise hundreds of negatives and thousands of
photographs. Photos from the early 19th century to the 1990s, varying
from holiday snapshots to photographic
work by legends in the field of (architecture) photography.
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The majority of the collection consists of paper: books, magazines,
drawings, photographs, letters, posters and notes. However, there are
also a large number of three-dimensional objects: a collection of
approximately 1,300 scale models, furniture and crockery from the Sonneveld House, as well as archival objects such as stamps, medallions,
colour swatches and construction elements.
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The NAI’s poster collection comprises almost 1,500 posters from 1893 to
the present. They come from the archives of various architects,
architecture agencies and organisations, having been collected, and
some even designed, by the architects themselves.
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The NAI library collects and manages information about Dutch and international architecture, urban design, and related design fields such as housing, spatial planning, landscape architecture, and interior architecture.
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