Most of the archives in the collection contain two-dimensional materials that reflect the activities of an architectural practice, such as drawings, sketches, photographs, letters and notes. In some cases, an architect's estate also contains small objects, such as drawing materials, name plates, penholders, colour and material samples, tableware, sculptures and small tools, such as spirit levels, volutes, trowels or rulers. The collection contains around 500 objects of this kind. Almost all of them have been photographed and described and can be viewed via the Search Portal.

The new round of the Prix de Rome Architecture just started. The first round - Low Pressure - is an open competition that addresses a specific rural area in the province of Groningen. The shortlist will be announced mid April 2018. From the end of September / beginning of October the results will be exhibited at Het Nieuwe Instituut.

Data-experience designer Jan Willem Tulp created a visualisation of the metadata of the State Archive for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning.

Letters to the Mayor is a presentation series comprising a set of personal letters written by architects to their city mayors. For the edition in Rotterdam, a group of architects who have had a relation with the city were invited to deliver their thoughts directly to Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb as a means of bringing innovative ideas and visions of the city closer to its decision-makers, and vice versa. The presentation comes as a result of a year-long collaboration between Het Nieuwe Instituut and Storefront for Art and Architecture around the theme of 'City Forces'. On Friday 12 January 2018, the Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam will be opened in the presence of Rotterdam's Mayor. The presentation is on show until 11 February.

A duo lecture in Sonneveld House with designer Sabine Marcelis and architecture historian Hetty Berens. Marcelis and Berens will each reflect upon De Stijl as a design movement by looking at a specific interior design project. The two stories make clear that De Stijl was far from being an isolated avant-garde project but was and remains highly inf…

Het Nieuwe Instituut, the commissioner of WORK, BODY, LEISURE, the official Dutch contribution to the Biennale Architettura 2018, announces the commissioned exhibitors at the Rietveld Pavilion in the Biennale's Giardini, and selected projects for the extended program.

Het Nieuwe Instituut has recently acquired the archive of Gerard van Zeijl (1940-2017), former professor at Eindhoven University of Technology. In addition to documentation relating to his design practice and teaching career, the archive also features fine art, including several surprising collages and screen prints from the period 1963-78.

On 27 October 2017, Het Nieuwe Instituut hosted a consortium meeting of Cities of Making, a European project asking the what, where, and how of 21st-century urban manufacturing. Het Nieuwe Instituut is one of the partners collaborating with the Department of Urbanism of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft, in envisioning what the spatial conditions of re-industrialization might look like in the cities Brussels, London, and Rotterdam.

A 'wonderful chaos', liveliness and a broad range of opportunities for bumping into your neighbours. Architect Piet Blom was one of the most ardent champions of this idea. He elaborated it in a series of drawings, models and brochures entitled 'Living as Urban Roof', an investigation of a new community model, integrating all the functions of urban living. A selection of drawings from this series is on display in the Rijksmuseum from 9 November.

This publication documents an intensive ten-week workshop programme in which students imagined the potential for reuse of the legacy of post-war modernist buildings as well as some iconic and didactic contemporary projects.

In 2016, Het Nieuwe Instituut began a long-term project to conserve the estimated 300,000 photographs in the collection of the State Archive for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning. The first 50,000 photos have already been conserved and digitised.