The Amsterdam Academy of Architecture approached the photograper Jeroen Musch (1964) for this purpose. Jeroen was educated at the Rietveld Academy, lives in Rotterdam and works internationally. A photographer with a proven record in various fields of photography. With his temporary presence as Artist in Residence Jeroen Musch is asked to throw students off balance through asking the unusual, the unorthodox; through a certain uneasiness, an imbalance, caused by having to learn how to experience time and space through the sensors of the photographer.

Winter School
The theme of the Academy of Architecture’s 2017 Winter School is ‘seeing’. Seeing is more than ‘looking’. Seeing is about understanding, seeing is about feeling, seeing is about valuing. This is a skill which designers like architects, urbanists and landscape architects should master more and more in today’s ‘searching times’, in which society is becoming increasingly diverse and developments are not always the logical outcome of programmatic needs anymore.

With their natural curiosity and trained ability to imagine use and space, designers could also lead the way in seeing. If designers want their design proposals to be taken seriously, it’s their responsibility to be serious about influencing the way we look at space and place. ‘Place’ is the issue in particular. What is the appropriate thing to suggest, try or do in a specific case? What does not follow on from programmatic or conceptual thinking? What if ‘specifi cness’, not ‘genericness’, is the ambition?

The Academy has invited Jeroen Musch to be curator and inspirator of the 2017 Winter School. Being a photographer originally trained as an architect, he‘s uniquely qualified to fulfil these roles. The subject of study will be the former Naval Barracks (the 'Marineterrein') in Amsterdam. An intriguing piece of city in the center of Amsterdam. It has recently been made accessible to a wider public and is a site everybody is looking at. We’re going to help them truly see it!

Final presentation, prize and jury
The Winter School is organised as a competition in which students work together in studios of no more than 10 students on one product, in this case a movie with a duration of 3.13 minutes. A total of 18 studios will take part in the competition. Each studio is composed in an interdisciplinairy way, consisting of students of architecture, urbanism and landscape architecture.

The final presentation on Friday 27 January from 15h00 will take the form of a mini film festival at the Academy of Architecture. Also there is a prize to be won. Approximately 6 teams will be nominated to participate in an ‘on-site’ movie screening festival at the Marineterrein. The jury will consist of Liesbeth Jansen (Project director Marineterrein), Jeroen Musch (AIR), Madeleine Maaskant, Arjan Klok, Jan Richard Kikkert and Maike van Stiphout (Board of Studies of the Academy of Architecture).

On AIR
The AIR programme is an initiative in conjunction with the departments of the Amsterdam University of the Arts. It stimulates innovation and facilitates encounters with contemporary art practice. It provides host faculties with the opportunity to benefit from the experience of respected artists, breathing new life into the educational and artistic structures of the Academy. The focus is on current interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary developments, and on interaction with the international ‘state of the art’. At the Academy of Architecture Jeroen Musch is the successor of Gabriel Lester, Michiel Schwarz, Rianne Makkink, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Jeroen Kooijmans, the duo Adriaan Beukers and Ed van Hinte, Erik Kessels, Krisztina de Chatel, Luc Deleu and Paul Shepheard.