Disclosing Architecture: 18 Stories of Heritage and InnovationDisclosing Architecture: 18 Stories of Heritage and Innovation

For the past six years, a team of Collection staff members have been working to select, conserve and register design drawings. Around 120,000 drawings have been processed each year. Some of them stay with you longer than others. We highlight some of these special pieces based on personal ‘encounters’ in the archive.

Nieuwe Instituut manages the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning, an archive of more than 4 million items. When these documents are photographed and digitised, ‘happy accidents’ occasionally occur – the result, for example, of overexposure, glitches, movement during capture, moiré or files that are too large.

Because of the great cultural and historical significance of the works, it is important that they can be exhibited, consulted and handled safely in the future. For this reason, the Van Doesburg collection has undergone a separate restoration, involving highly specialised material and colour research and the meticulous restoration of 444 works.

Copyright is about the creators. They have often put a lot of time, money and love into creating their work and logically they want to protect it. We do not want to ignore this. At the same time, the Nieuwe Instituut has the ambition and, as a public institution, the duty to make as much material available for use as possible. These are different interests, which we try to serve as best we can with our copyright policy.

The accessibility of digital information depends on its discoverability and therefore on the quality of the (meta)data. Better registration makes it easier to make connections within the collection, but also to connect different collections. This is one of the aims of the new collection platform being developed as part of Disclosing Architecture.

As part of the Disclosing Architecture project, the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science commissioned the Nieuwe Instituut to develop an innovative service platform fully compliant with the data and infrastructure standards of the Dutch Digital Heritage Network.

Collecting Otherwise investigates and analyses the role of archives in shaping institutional memory, urban history and public heritage. It aims to review the role of the institute in collecting and constructing heritage, while addressing fundamental questions about national and archival collections.

Rethinking Collecting aimed to explore new perspectives on collecting, one of the core tasks of the Nieuwe Instituut. We approached this through two themes: "diversity" and "architecture and digital culture." These topics were not only intended as collection themes but also served to question the very process and purpose of archiving itself.