Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI) is an arts institute for exhibitions, lectures, and research on architecture-and-design-based disciplines in Rotterdam. The institute’s Dutch compatriots MVRDV have just signed a contract which will see the practices early work be uploaded to a new digital archive.

The collection will feature MVRDV’s work from 1993–2008 and both parties have agreed for the online database to be updated in the future. HNI also aims to make the collection open to the public at a later, yet-to-be-decided date.

To quantify the scale of the database, it will boast 400 MVRDV projects, stored in eight terabytes. The archive hopes to illustrate the firm’s architectural development over time.

“We have discussed various possibilities with museums around the world, and we will also give parts of the archive to other collections,” Jacob van Rijs, architect and co-founder of MVRDV, said in a statement. “But because our archive is digital, there is an opportunity to show every project book we’ve ever created at HNI. That will be a treasure trove for researchers.”

Some of the projects featured will include: Villa VPRO, the Silodam and the Markthal Rotterdam, as well as more theoretical projects based on data analysis, an early fascination of MVRDV: Meta City Datatown, Pig City, and 3D City Cube.