The nineteenth edition of the International Carlo Scarpa Garden Prize, dedicated to Amsterdam’s Museumplein, also includes an exhibition of drawings and documents on the Museumplein history and on the work of Sven-Ingvar Andersson.

The exhibition is directly connected to the publication dedicated by the Foundation to the Museumplein and in general to the documentation work on the awarded site, and is set up in three of the exhibition halls on the first floor of Palazzo Bomben.

The “room of views” houses, among the sixteenth century decorations that characterise it, a sort of short geo-historical introduction to the site, with maps, current and historical photographs of the city of Amsterdam and the Museumplein area, and an overview of the main projects that involved the “museum field”, in particular from 1866 to 1988, before the work of Sven-Ingvar Andersson (1992-1999). The transition between the first and second hall consists of a panel devoted to some “ideal” iconographic references underlying the design work of Sven-Ingvar Andersson and his staff, namely Dutch urban planner Stefan Gall and landscape architect Henrik Pøhlsgaard, Andersson’s assistant at the time.

The “hall of hours” (whose name comes from the subject of the frescoes by Giovan Battista Canal that decorate it) is dedicated to the operation carried out, with photographs of the Museumplein dating back to 1999 (year of the inauguration) as well as present-day ones, and the design work, documented by sketches and drawings from Sven-Ingvar Andersson’s archive (now at the Danmarks Kunstbibliotek of Copenaghen).

The set-up of the exhibition continues to the third hall “of the myths”, which houses the design’s preliminary model, publicly presented in Amsterdam in 1993 and now on display here thanks to the cooperation of Amsterdam’s public Administration, namely the Municipality of Oud-Zuid. Next to the maquette there is a short video (5 minutes) put together in September 1999 where Sven-Ingvar Andersson talks about Museumplein.

The route concludes back in the second hall, with a series of photographic panels dedicated to Sven-Ingvar Andersson in particular, and to the inauguration day of the Museumplein, on 22nd August 1999.