How Dutch Design Will Save You
In this free lecture, Aaron Betsky, Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum, and former Director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, discusses recent developments in Dutch architecture and design that show how the Dutch have developed responses to large social issues such as sprawl and sustainability through innovative design rather than merely through technological fixes. Social housing, infrastructure, public open space, and everyday design all make up a landscape of transformation in which the artificiality of the environment we inhabit collectively is the starting point, and the making of better space for everyone is the goal.

About Aaron Betsky
Aaron Betsky is the eighth director of the Cincinnati Art Museum. Most recently he directed the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, the world’s largest architecture museum, and prior to that post he served as Curator of Architecture, Design and Digital Projects at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Mr. Betsky was born in Missoula, Montana and raised in the Netherlands. He lived in Cincinnati in the mid 1980s, where he taught design, history and theory courses in the School of Architecture and Interior Design at U.C. Betsky was also on the Contemporary Arts Center’s architect selection committee for their new building in 1998.
A prolific writer and editor, he has authored over a dozen books and is currently working on a major volume on modernism in architecture and design. He has been published in many newspapers and magazines, ranging from The New York Times to Metropolitan Home. Betsky has served as a visiting professor at major universities across the US and in Europe and has received honors from the British Institute of Architects and the American Institute of Architects. He holds a B.A. in History, the Arts and Letters and a master’s degree in architecture from Yale University, with a doctoral degree expected in 2007 from the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands.