Mission

The International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) is a cultural institution dedicated to fostering informed public discourse on the spatial urgencies of our time. Architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism are essential, pioneering, and connective disciplines in this discourse. The IABR helps interpret and address societal challenges and the spatial consequences of a changing world and climate. Through their work, designers make these transformations visible and help guide us toward possible futures.

Issues such as water safety, the energy transition, housing shortages, carbon reduction, and food security are fundamentally spatial in nature — both in the Netherlands and globally. Embracing this complexity, designers critically and constructively engage with these challenges, identifying opportunities for meaningful action.

Since its inaugural edition in 2003, the IABR has consistently emphasized the value of research by design. Central to this approach is a sustained commitment to fostering healthy and just cities that exist in balance with their surrounding ecosystems.

Every two years, the IABR presents its biennial manifestation: an extensive public cultural program comprising exhibitions, debates, lectures, workshops, and guided tours. On this international platform, the imaginative power of architecture is explored and celebrated.

Between biennial editions, the IABR continues its work through research initiatives, collaborations, learning trajectories, and public debates. Based in Rotterdam, the biennale plays an active role in setting agendas and stimulating the national and international discourse on architecture.

Research
The IABR encourages and facilitates various forms of long-term research. On the one hand, the biennale brings together designers, governments, and social partners in research-by-design programs to develop concrete, applicable solutions to current spatial problems. In the Rotterdam district of Bospolder-Tussendijken, for example, this is done together with citizens and existing neighborhood initiatives. On the other hand, the IABR supports more theoretical or speculative research projects by individual designers and researchers, the Agents of Change. In addition, the biennale collaborates with educational institutions. The results of these various undertakings, both the extensive collaborative programs and the more individual trajectories, are presented in the biannual exhibition program.
Exhibition
All of this comes together in the biannual public event of the Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. For each edition, a curator or curatorial team is given the opportunity to put together an exhibition program based on an overarching theme. The exhibitions combine form and content and incorporate the results of long-term studies, best practices, and other inspiring examples. During the cultural event, the exhibition creates a context and a place for knowledge exchange, debate, encounter, inspiration, experience, and dialogue.
Debate
The IABR is agenda-setting, inquisitive, and inspiring by initiating, organizing, and producing conferences, films, books, lectures, debates, workshops, and master classes. Much of this program takes place both during the biannual event and between editions. This ongoing process of reflection and exchange among the design disciplines, with stakeholders such as citizens, governments, developers, businesses, and the public, also feeds back into the substantive program of successive biennale editions.

Mission

Research

Exhibition

Debate