We are proud that the Van Gogh Village Museum in Nuenen has been nominated for the BNA Best Building of the Year 2024. The professional jury selected eleven projects this year from nearly a hundred submissions that are eligible for the award. The nominated projects are divided into four categories. One winner will be chosen per category. The overall winner, not necessarily one of the category winners, will be chosen by the professional jury as the BNA Best Building of the Year. The public can also vote until May 7th to determine the winner of the audience award.

The professional organization for Dutch architects has been organizing this award annually since 2006. In 2013, we were honored to receive the jury prize for Ketelhuis Ceres, and in 2020, we won the audience award for the Domusdela project. We are very pleased that with our modest expansion of the Van Gogh Village Museum, we have another chance at this prestigious award.

The design for the museum in Nuenen is a carefully researched, contemporary interpretation of history. On the open space next to the current museum once stood two small farms. The new volume designed for this purpose follows the historical subdivision and refers to the ’langskap’ farms of yesteryear. The old barn doors reappear in a new variant at the entrance, which gracefully opens the building to the village, with Van Gogh’s parents’ rectory and the house next door, where his forbidden love once lived, across the street.

Vincent depicts in Nuenen particularly the everyday, tough lives of farmers and weavers. From December 1883 to November 1885, he created a quarter of his total oeuvre here. The painting “The Potato Eaters” is one of them. The canvas is on display at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Another version, the first not yet fully finished version, is located in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. In the museum in Nuenen, the scene depicted in the painting is staged. For this occasion, Tom Kuipers, Thorsten Schneider, Rob van den Broek, and Rob Meurders found it an irresistible idea to capture a group portrait of the design and engineering team.

Visit the Van Gogh Village Museum in Nuenen, but first, cast your vote for the museum for BNA Best Building of the Year 2024 via this link.