Nationaal Historisch Museum - Raad van Toezicht en directie Nationaal Historisch Museum, ricerca e mostra, Amsterdam

NHM is a museum without a permanent collection. This condition needs to be understood as an opportunity, not as a want. The hollowness of the Museum immediately suggests its possible urbanity. NHM is an open empty box waiting for aggressive metropolitan appropriation. Visitors can use NHM as a platform to explore Dutch history. So far, the most precise urban version of a “metropolitan empty box” is a Roman forum. A forum is a large urban void protected by walls and porticoes, with minor elements plugged in (temples, basilicas, and so on). The forum in itself is just a precinct. It has no function, it simply provides a precise frame formalizing the whatsoever happening inside. A forum is the formal infrastructure for the activities happening inside. It produces metropolitan intensity by defining a precise formal condition. It is nothing more than architecture. An hopper car moves along the walls over the open air room, helping moving big objects inside the space and allowing staging concerts and spectacles. Installations in the floor in between the arcade and the main museum level allow continuous re-programming of the spaces below and above. The possibility to re-program the building and the exhibition almost on a daily bases provides the NHM with a festive atmosphere. The monumentality of the forum is complemented by the playful machinery that allows to populate the forum with a multitude of objects and events. Kids will stare at cranes moving around the colossal head of Spinoza and the first Dutch combined harvester.