Together with the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, the Jaap Bakema Study centre has launched the new Architecture and Democracy PhD programme. This investigates how, over the course of the 20th century, architecture and urban planning played a role in representing, embodying and enabling democracy.

Making and keeping digital information sustainably accessible involves major challenges, such as the ongoing changes to media and technology, and the wide variety of software formats, file formats and information carriers. This preservation policy underscores the accountability for the definition of preservation and the Nieuwe Instituut's approach.

The Dutch contribution to the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, will travel to Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, where it will be open to the public from 21 December. The installation will chart a journey through a series of architectures in the Netherlands and beyond in which bodies are categorized and transformed: offices, playgrounds, farms, factories and virtual spaces, windows, beds, and doors. Scenarios that look familiar--if rarely accessible or seemingly banal--but are nevertheless at the epicenter of the transformation.

Ecology is now a well-known concept in architecture and urban planning. The research installation Habitat: Expanding Architecture, on show from 19 October, highlights one of the first moments in which ecological thinking was introduced in architectural discussions: the tenth CIAM congress in Dubrovnik, 1956.

On 20 October, Het Nieuwe Instituut presents two children's books: one is a reader - Hoi, ik ben een lijn (Hi, I'm a Line); the other is an activity book - Hoi, jij bent een ontwerper (Hi, You're a Designer). Both books introduce children to highlights of the State Archive of Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning and to architecture as a profession. Initiator and author Behrang Mousavi and project leader Clara Stille-Haardt reveal how the books were devised.

Artist Martin Butler and vegan chef Alexander Gershberg are hosting their multi-sensory eating experience in Seattle on three locations from September 9th through 14th. Het Nieuwe Instituut supports the project by commissioning new unique design pieces from Dutch designers: Cedric van Parys, Funda Baysal, David Derksen and Mae Engelgeer which are included into the concept of the dinner.

How do we preserve and share Dutch design heritage? What form should a collection of Dutch design take? And what does this mean for developments in design and digital culture today? This autumn, Het Nieuwe Instituut spotlights the memory of design disciplines. Three different presentations and an extensive events programme each examine the remains of our material and spatial design culture from their own perspective.

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On 17 July, Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven of the Department of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) issued a disbursement letter based on the 'Disclosing Architecture' masterplan officially allocating the first half of the 11 million euros awarded in March for the restoration, conservation and digitisation of Het Nieuwe Instituut's collection.

The archive of architect Evert Jelles has recently been catalogued and digitised. Jelles was a leading representative of the Dutch late Functionalist tradition in the period 1965-85 and is credited with rediscovering the work of Jan Duiker.

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