Off the shelf

The Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft houses a unique teaching collection of over 300 chairs. Unlike any other collection in the university, and because a collection’s purpose and needs deviate somewhat from the more common features of a given university department, its position can be challenging in terms of management, funding, and goals.

This publication discusses projects around the Chair Collection because this collection served as a test case for possible new approaches. Some of the projects in this publication appear to be part of a trend to reconnect collections to education. At the annual meeting of the European academic heritage network (Universeum) of 2016, these projects were presented to an audience of mainly university museum staff or university collection curators. The introduction of a dedicated session read:

Connecting the collections with research and education … In the last few years, we have seen an increased demand by university boards to demonstrate the use of collections as resources for research and education. Many university collections that originated and then dissociated from teaching and research are now reconnected to education and scientific investigation. Did the collections find their way back into the labs and the curriculum? How do new ways of object based learning and research give new meanings to collections?