Rotterdam-based practice MVRDV have begun a transfer of their early work, spanning fifteen years from 1993 to 2008, to Het Nieuwe Instituut — the central architecture archive of The Netherlands. This collection, which will eventually be made available to the public, will be in the institute's first primarily digital donation (approximately eight terabytes of data) and consisting of material from 400 of the practice's 680 total projects, including the Villa VPRO, the Silodam in Amsterdam, and the Markthal Rotterdam, as well as unrealised projects such as Meta City Datatown, Pig City, and 3D City Cube.
"MVRDV’s relationship with its archive is quite different than what we are used to from a historic preservation perspective," says Suzanne Mulder, who is supervising the archive transfer on behalf of Het Nieuwe Instituut. "When we talk about assessing value and making selections, or about preservation and heritage management, they talk about algorithms and search engines which could unlock the archive. Het Nieuwe Instituut will use this acquisition as a pilot project to develop future policies for dealing with archives which were born into the digital era."
