28 january 2026, Flor Linckens
Carlijn Kingma at Brutus: reading the housing crisis as a machine
Until 8 March, Brutus Space in Rotterdam presents the exhibition ‘Fear of Falling’ by Carlijn Kingma. The presentation centres on an issue that now affects almost everyone: housing, and in particular the question of why the system has become so persistently gridlocked. Kingma is represented by Gallery Untitled, where you can view a parallel overview exhibition of her work until 19 April 2026.
Kingma was born in Zutphen in 1991 and studied architecture at Delft University of Technology. She describes herself as a cartographer of society. Rather than geographical maps, she draws maps of complex systems, in which power, social relations, policy and flows of money take on an architectural form. In doing so, she constructs legible worlds that offer a way of grasping the structures that shape our everyday lives, and that certainly do not work equally well for everyone. Earlier projects include ‘The Waterworks of Money’ and ‘The Fabric of Humandkind’. These works do not present an easily digestible conclusion, but instead offer a landscape in which to briefly lose oneself and to forge new connections.
In an interview with Wouter van den Eijkel for GalleryViewer in 2023, Kingma put it this way: "The world around us is becoming increasingly complex. We are constantly confronted by a continuous stream of news, images and opinions and have to navigate between countless, often invisible, structures, roads and laws. That is why we need other maps to navigate today. Unlike many of history's touting techno-utopian or political futures, my maps are contemplative, nuanced and polyphonic. The metaphorical system analyses follow paths from history, consider the present and extrapolate it to possible future routes. By wandering through the socio-political structures, we can pause and reflect on about how we have organised our society and perhaps discover new routes to a sustainable and inclusive future."
In the exhibition ‘Fear of Falling’, Kingma presents several works, with “The Machinery of Housing” at its core. In this monumental drawing, measuring 1.10 by 1.60 metres, she brings together the key actors within public housing in a single image, from banks and markets to housing corporations, developers, municipalities and the political sphere where rules and subsidies are determined. These actors and interests are visualised in a metaphorical, tower-like machine construction that can be read as a political manifesto advocating a more just system. The result is exceptionally precise: it clarifies the situation while simultaneously raising questions about responsibility, about who fails and who benefits. The image is rich in detail, but never merely decorative. Every element points to where the system gets stuck and where movement might be possible, or where ‘levers’ could be imagined. The layered nature of the drawing reinforces the idea that this is not a single problem with a single cause, but rather a convergence of factors, dependencies and interests. Key factors include excessive lending capacity, which significantly drives up house prices, and the reduced supply of social housing. Measures such as abolishing mortgage interest relief, interventions in land ownership, alternative forms of housing and relaxed environmental criteria offer only partial solutions. To fully understand this complexity, Kingma conducted more than one hundred interviews and collaborated with the Ministry of Housing and Spatial Planning, the Province of South Holland and Triodos Bank.
The creation of such immense maps is intensive and slow, deliberately running counter to the spirit of the times. Using technical drawing instruments such as a Rotring pen and ink, Kingma builds her worlds line by line. “The Machinery of Housing” took eight months to complete. Visually, her imagery draws inspiration from the work of Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Giovanni Battista Piranesi.
The drawing process is preceded by extensive research and conversations with experts and people with lived experience. Kingma regularly collaborates with researchers and journalists, including Rutger Bregman in partnership with De Correspondent. That way, she can get a clear picture of complex dossiers and find an appropriate language for what usually remains hidden behind figures and jargon. For this project, Kingma worked with Thomas Bollen, economist and investigative journalist for Follow the Money, Martijn Jeroen van der Linden, lector of New Finance at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, Sarah van der Giesen, architect, and Jackie Ashkin, PhD candidate in Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University. Thomas Bollen translated the joint research into the recently published book Geld genoeg, maar niet voor jou (Money is abundant, but not for you).
‘Fear of Falling’, the title of the exhibition at Brutus Space, refers to Barbara Ehrenreich’s well-known book of the same name. The award-winning journalist argued that the middle class is driven by a fear of falling, the anxiety of economic decline, and that this fear not only hardens political choices but also conceals how precarious life below and just within the middle class actually is. Kingma connects this feeling to a housing reality in which upward mobility is increasingly out of reach for many, while economic downturn remains a very real threat, amplified by daily headlines about an impending recession. In the drawing, these tensions do not appear as isolated incidents, but as built-in mechanisms that drive the whole system. Through projections, detail images and animations in the exhibition, these tensions become even more visible, inviting visitors to dive deeper into the image. The work also resonates within the raw, industrial spaces of Brutus.
Tip: on 24 February from 19.30 to 21.30, Brutus Space and Follow the Money are organising ‘De Avond van Ons Grote Woonprobleem’. During this (Dutch) evening programme, various parties including a politician, a developer, an expert and people searching for housing will be given a voice. “The Machinery of Housing” will also be shown for the first time in animated form that evening, and will later be shown on the Follow the Money platform. The project will subsequently travel to various educational institutions.
Carlijn Kingma’s work has previously been shown at the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rijksmuseum Twenthe and the Architecture Biennale in Venice. From 2017 to 2018, Kingma was a resident at the Brutus Lab. She has received several awards including the Amsterdam Prize for the Arts, the New Babylon Award and the Architecture Drawing Prize for hand-drawing, and her work has been acquired by the collections of Rijksmuseum Twenthe and Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
