Material Library

The Material Library is an initiative that foregrounds the interconnected material processes underlying the life of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie as a place of education, a building with diverse facilities, and a socio-material community. It seeks to bring the academy’s complex material domain into a visible and graspable realm through a digital, visual database, while also creating publics around and with the materials of the academy.

The library expands through intensive workshops called Material Assemblies that are held throughout the year. Open for students and staff, these workshops identify opportunistic entry points into the material chains of the academy and explore the links that connect them. The library grows by tracing materials that are consumed, produced, condensed, and transformed within the academy.

The Material Library is developed as an open platform and a shared resource that invites all members of the Rietveld community to use it, appropriate it, co-opt it, contribute to it, develop learning methodologies around it and along the way build a shared vision of kinship with the materials of the academy.

The library offers two different ways to naviagte. On the left pane one can choose between map or list view. The map view allows panning through each floorplan of the academy and discovering materials via the green asterisk symbols. The list view displays all the materials in a column. The fields at the top of the left window allow for filtering materials by type and location.

Material Assemblies

001: Introducing the Material Library, 19 November 25

002: Virtual Estate, 22 April 26

The Material Library is co-hosted by Rietveld Sandberg Research and Urgent Ecologies.