Five manifestos by Rotterdam’s architects.
Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam publication emerged as a follow-up to the exhibition under the same title organized by Het Nieuwe Instituut in collaboration with the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. The publication includes five short manifestos on the most pressing issues for the city accompanied by the original letters, three critical reflections, reports from public talks, and an image essay by the Rotterdam photographer Rubén Dario Kleimeer. The five manifestos were written based by teams of local architects, who addressed those issues in their letter. They focused on the Big Green, Housing as a Human Right and a Monument to Diversity, The Fair City, The Architecture of Work, and A Serious City of Architecture. You can download the full publication here.
Amateur Cities together with Negar Sanaan Bensi, Jere Kuzmanic, Ameneh Solati, Marta Roy Torrecilla, and Andrea Prins contributed to the theme focusing on housing titled Housing as a Human Right and a Monument to Diversity.
“With the rise of globalization and the homogenization of the contemporary city, the role of the architect in the political arena has often been relegated to answering questions that others have asked.”
These are the words of Eva Franch i Gilabert, who initiated Letters to the Mayor in New York in 2014, as the then-director of Storefront. She invited architects in various cities around the world to write a letter to their mayor. In this way, she hoped to give architects a voice in the discussion about the development of their city. Following presentations in Bogotá, Mexico City, Athens, and Madrid, among other cities, Het Nieuwe Instituut offered to host the Rotterdam edition of the project.
