From AIVE to Design Academy Eindhoven.

Design Academy Eindhoven is a school of design in the Dutch city of Eindhoven, and for decades it carried a longer and more technical name: the Academie voor Industriële Vormgeving, an academy for industrial design, usually shortened to AIVE. English Wikipedia says the school was established in 1947 under that name and that its opening class graduated in 1955. Dutch Wikipedia tells the start in a different way: it says a School for Industrial Design was founded in 1955 by René Smeets, Kees Bol and Kees Houtman, and later became known as the AIVE.

A longer account appeared in Ons Erfdeel, the Flemish–Dutch cultural journal, in 2008, in an essay by the art historian Petri Leijdekkers titled “De Design Academy Eindhoven ‘School of Cool’”. Leijdekkers places the school’s roots in an evening school for applied arts that opened in Eindhoven in 1949, linked to the local textile industry, with René Smeets as its director. At the time, he writes, the Netherlands was debating how industrial designers should be trained. One group in a national committee favoured a separate university faculty in direct contact with industry; another, led by directors of art academies in Rotterdam and The Hague, wanted to keep training inside the arts-and-crafts tradition.

Smeets took part in that debate, and according to Leijdekkers the Eindhoven school chose to go further than the discussion itself. It planned a day academy devoted entirely to industrial design, a plan he says was welcomed by the city and by its main resident company, Philips. In 1955 the day academy for industrial design, the AIVE, was founded. Leijdekkers stresses that Smeets and his successors chose to concentrate on a single field, industrial design, while other academies kept a broader spread of disciplines, and that its position as a small, independent and specialised school gave the AIVE room to develop its own direction.

The current name came at the end of the 1990s. Dutch Wikipedia dates the change to the end of 1997, and English Wikipedia also gives 1997, linking the new name to the move into a new building that year. Leijdekkers describes the change more loosely as happening in the late 1990s. Since then the school has used Design Academy Eindhoven, often shortened to DAE.

In the summer of 2007, as quoted by Leijdekkers, the American magazine Time drew attention to the school’s departments with names such as “Man and Living” and “Man and Identity”, a way of organising teaching around how people live rather than around product types. English Wikipedia says the bachelor’s programme is now split into interdisciplinary departments covering art, architecture, fashion, graphic and industrial design, and that students are free to move between them and graduate with the same degree, a Bachelor of Design.

A white factory, an Amsterdam exchange and a design week.

The building at the centre of the school’s image is the Witte Dame, the “White Lady”, a large white industrial block in the centre of Eindhoven. Leijdekkers writes in Ons Erfdeel that it was designed in the late 1920s by the architect Dirk Roosenburg for Philips, which used it for the production of light bulbs. He describes its open spaces in the style of the Nieuwe Zakelijkheid, the Dutch “new objectivity”, as an ideal setting for a design academy.

The move came after decades in what Leijdekkers calls a dull school building. He dates it to 1998, while English Wikipedia dates the move into the Witte Dame to 1997, the same year it gives for the change of name. In Leijdekkers’s account, the new home changed the working atmosphere of the school: the building breathed industry, its open floors encouraged both work and conversation, and the academy now had a clear image of what it was. A photograph in the 2008 essay carries a caption describing the Witte Dame as the home of the academy since 1998.

Where students showed their final work also changed over time. Leijdekkers writes that from 1991 to 2001 the annual graduation presentations were held not in Eindhoven but in the Beurs van Berlage, the former exchange building in Amsterdam. English Wikipedia says that after Li Edelkoort became chair in 1999 the graduation ceremonies were brought back to Eindhoven. The graduation exhibition is now held each autumn during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, which English Wikipedia lists among the city’s design events alongside the Dutch Design Awards.

The academy also shows work abroad. A caption in the 2008 essay describes “Post Mortem”, a presentation of designs about death staged by the academy in a monastery in Milan during the Salone del Mobile in 2005. Leijdekkers places the school within a wider movement in Dutch design of the 1990s. He writes that Droog Design was founded in 1993 by Renny Ramakers, then editor of the journal Industrieel Ontwerpen, and Gijs Bakker, a designer and head teacher at the AIVE, and that it gathered young designers who combined existing objects and materials into new everyday things.

A further move is planned. English Wikipedia says that in 2023 the school announced a plan to move to a new building, the Microlab on Strijp-S in Eindhoven, by 2027.

A school named for a city and a discipline.

Schools and cultural institutions carry identities that work differently from those of consumer brands. Many began with a crest, a seal or a formal Latin motto, the visual language of charters and certificates, and later added or swapped in a plain wordmark that sits more easily on a website, a banner or a tote bag. Others never had a crest at all and built their recognition on a single letter, a typeface or a set of initials.

The building often does as much work as any mark. A façade, an extension or a distinctive staircase becomes the image that photographers, students and visitors repeat, and a new wing can change how an institution is pictured for decades. Posters are a second, older surface: a steady programme of exhibition and event posters, set in a consistent grid or typeface, can define a place more clearly than its logo.

Exhibitions, catalogues, yearbooks, journals and reports extend that system into print, and each title is a chance to test the identity at a new scale. When reading these guides, look at the whole family of surfaces together: the mark, the building, the posters and the publications usually tell one story.

Directors, chairs and creative directors, dated.

The school’s leadership can be followed through a series of dated handovers. Leijdekkers writes in Ons Erfdeel that Jan Lucassen was director, and later chair of the executive board, from 1975 to 1999, and that together with Jan van Duppen he led the school into its current position. In 1998, he says, Lucassen asked the trend forecaster Lidewij (Li) Edelkoort to succeed him, and the 2008 essay describes her as chair of the academy’s executive board since 1999.

English Wikipedia continues the sequence. It says Edelkoort left the Design Academy in 2009 to pursue her own projects and was replaced as chair by Anne Mieke Eggenkamp, and that Ilse Crawford and Oscar Peña led bachelor’s programmes from 1999 to 2019. Dezeen reported on 13 June 2017 that Thomas Widdershoven had been appointed in 2013 and had resigned in 2016; English Wikipedia says he served until September 2016.

The same Dezeen article, by Alice Morby, reported that Joseph Grima had been appointed creative director of Design Academy Eindhoven, at a moment when the school had not yet confirmed the appointment and said it would issue a statement. Dezeen described Grima as an architecture critic and the founder of the design research studio Space Caviar. It said he had curated the Biennale Interieur in Kortrijk, the Istanbul Design Biennial and the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial, that he was director of the Ideas City festival at New York’s New Museum, and that he had become editor-in-chief of Domus in 2011, a post he held for two years. English Wikipedia says Grima has led the school as creative director since 2017.

The academy’s teaching is organised around master’s programmes as well as the bachelor’s course. English Wikipedia lists five: Contextual Design, Social Design, Information Design, Geo-Design and the Critical Inquiry Lab, formerly Design Curating and Writing.

The school has also been the subject of its own books. English Wikipedia lists House of Concepts: Design Academy Eindhoven, edited by Louise Schouwenberg, Gert Staal and Martijn Goedegebuure and published by Frame Publishers in Amsterdam in 2008, as further reading.

For a design guide, Design Academy Eindhoven shows how an institution’s identity can be carried by a place and a working method as much as by a mark: an academy built around industrial design, renamed in English in the late 1990s and housed in a former Philips factory. Compare Dutch Design Week, where its graduates show each autumn, and the Stedelijk Museum, another Dutch design institution in this collection. For this guide we use white, concrete and graphite with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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