Dirk van den Heuvel is an Associate Professor with the Department of Architecture, where he leads the recently launched group Architecture Archives of the Future. He's also the co-founder and head of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre the special research collaboration between the Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment with the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, which holds the Dutch national archives for architecture and urban planning. His expertise is in postwar modern architecture and planning, and its related fields of architecture theory and history, cultural studies and discourse analysis. Key book publications include 'Habitat: Ecology Thinking in Architecture' (2020),  'Jaap Bakema and the Open Society' (2018), and 'Architecture and the Welfare State' (2015). 

Van den Heuvel was a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Architecture at Monash University, Melbourne, in 2019. In 2017 Van den Heuvel was awarded with a Richard Rogers Fellowship from Harvard GSD for his research project 'Socio-plastics' on New Brutalism in architecture with regard to British welfare state politics. He was the curator of the Dutch national pavilion for the 14th architecture exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2014. Other exhibitions include 'Art on Display 1949-69' for the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon (2019-2020) and 'Structuralism' at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam (2014), together with Herman Hertzberger. For Bureau Europa, Maastricht he curated the show 'Changing Ideals: Re-thinking the House' (2008). With Max Risselada he organised two international exhibitions and publications: ‘Team 10 – In Search of a Utopia of the Present’ (2005) and ‘Alison and Peter Smithson – from the House of the Future to a house of today’ (2004). A special book project concerned the history of Dutch architectural education: ‘Lessons: Tupker / Risselada. A Double Portrait of Dutch Architectural Education’ (2003, with Madeleine Steigenga and Jaap van Triest).

He is an editorial board member of the Spanish open-access, on-line research journal VLC Arquitectura. He was an editor of the series Delft Architectural Studies on Housing, DASH (2007-2023), for the open-access on-line journal for architecture theory Footprint (2007-2020) and of the journal OASE (1993-1999). His writings have been published in numerous international magazines and on-line media, among which the Journal of Architecture, AA-Files, Volume and the Dutch website ArchiNed. He has worked as an architect for the offices of Neutelings Riedijk Architecten, De Nijl Architecten, and Madeleine Steigenga. His favourite piece of architecture is the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London.

Expert in the fields of: Architecture, History and theory of modern architecture and urban planning, Housing, Welfare State, New Brutalism, Dutch Structuralism, CIAM, Team 10.