

The Beijing-based firm led by Ma Yansong, MAD Architects, has been contracted to transform the San Francisco warehouse in the port of Rotterdam into a museum on global migration. On the south bank of the River Maas, the 16,000-square-meter building w
The team formed by the Spanish practice of Tuñón y Albornoz and the Belgian firm Dhoore-Vanweert Architecten has won the public tender to revamp the Landbouwbelang block in the Dutch city of Maastricht. Covering a built area of 40,500 square meters,
The modular wood system developed by Circlewood – a collective of architects, engineers, builders, and researchers headed by OMA/David Gianotten – came about as a response to the City of Amsterdam’s Innovation Partnership School Buildings program of
What was a summer residence of the Dutch royal family, built in the 17th century in Apeldoom, was used as a Nazi hospital in World War II, and since 1984, after a renovation by KAAN Architecten, it has been home to a state museum. The new refurbishme
Although senates are, in general, bodies made up of elected citizens, they have not managed to shake off a certain elitist whiff. At least by etymology, the senex (the elders of the tribe) and the patricians, peers, and heroes congregate in them. Sen
As part of a larger urban plan, the 'Bovenbouwwerkplaats' project turns a 1905 building where large elements of trains were manufactured into a cultural center for the Dutch city of Utrecht. The refurbishment of the warehouse involved preserving and
The Groningen office of the firm De Zwarte Hond was commissioned to design a central building that would serve as a social space for Meerstad, an up-and-coming developing residential zone that falls under the jurisdiction of the northern Dutch city.
The reconstruction of this canal of Utrecht (Netherlands), carried out by OKRA, has won the 11th European Prize for Urban Public Space. Created by the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), the award has since the year 2000 biennially h
The nhow RAI Hotel rises in the rapidly developing Zuidas business district, in the south of Amsterdam. The 91-meter building contains a mixed program with workspaces as well as entertainment. The main part is the hotel, which occupies nineteen of th
Upon its completion in 1992, Rijnstraat 8 represented both an innovative office typology – its atriums served as conservatories – and a leading example of sustainability. Over time, the building no longer offered the flexibility required of a contemp
Storing over 151,000 artworks, Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen opens to the public in Rotterdam (6 November 2021), a work of the Dutch firm MVRDV. The outcome of a competition held in 2014, the 15,000-square-meter construction rises in the north part of
The conversion of the Fenix warehouse into a museum of migration incorporates a public atrium and a theatrical stairway that will allow users to move throughout the space. It will be the first MAD-designed public cultural building in Europe...
Built with Wachenzeller Dolomite – very similar to the stone of the church and the town hall –, the facades are interspersed with immense surfaces of optimized triple glazing that keep temperature constant inside the building and make it energy effic
The complex is designed as a modular system that guarantees its adaptability to future demands, in which the ‘rambla’ – a pedestrian street that favors social interaction – enters into the ‘kapsalon’ – a center for cultural and production activities.
The urban area is multiplied for and by the new ways of living, working, and entertaining in the 21st century through a series of levels that are thermally equipped and that densify the city and offer a neutral umbrella for human and animal coexisten
Perfectly integrated into the existing street pattern and inspired in the wooded landscape of the Veluwe area, the station is protected with a roof formed by wood triangles that, like a canopy of leaves, lets light pass through... [+]
To go unnoticed but without sacrificing an architectural language of strong personality: this was the fundamental consideration in the course of designing the villa in Vught, a municipality in the southern Netherlands. To this end, rather than concen
Drawn up by an OMA design team led by David Gianotten and Mariano Sagasta, the masterplan for reurbanizing the VDMA site in the center of Eindhoven transforms the area into a mixed-use hub, with housing, offices, and public spaces distributed in 75,0
On the shore of a harbor zone that is currently undergoing a large-scale regeneration process, an atypical dairy churns out its products sustainably and distributes them in the vicinity.
The renovation of MVRDV’s offices pursues spatial continuity between the five arched segments that form the complex, and creates spaces for the firm’s 150 employees to interact in.
Surrounded by an extraordinary landscape of polders, the building rises like a vertical sea vessel whose glass walls engage in a dialogue with the typical changing Dutch atmosphere.
Ijburg is one of Amsterdam’s new urban developments, extending over seven artificial islands in the southeastern part of the Dutch capital. The largest, Haveneiland, is the location of Solids, a seven-building complex that marks the entrance to the d
The arcade was the starting point of this office building in Oosterdokseiland, an island close to Amsterdam Central Station. The masterplan specified that all constructions within this new urban development area include a public zone. This naturally
Upon the death of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands in 1962, Het Loo – the summer residence of the House of Orange-Nassau – became a property of the State, and some time later it was turned into a museum. Through an extensive renovation, KAAN Archi
While architectural photography is typically known to showcase isolated buildings and pristine environments, the work of Iwan Baan (Alkmaar, Netherlands, 1975) goes beyond this approach of reproducing artificially perfected environments. The book Mom
Robert Smithson’s only earthwork outside the United States opens this summer to celebrate its fiftieth birthday. Between July and October 2021 Robert Smithson’s earthwork Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971) will be open for eight weekends. Located near
How many OMA projects do you know? Chances are a few, given you’re engaged in architecture to the extent that you read magazines such as the one in which these words are printed. Fifty? One hundred? Less? Ten? More? The office’s output certainly did
Architecture is choral: it is conceived, built, and enjoyed by many. Choral in their design, execution, and use, projects admit the intervention of soloists, and it is inevitable to associate exemplary works to a charismatic author, a demanding contr
Reminiscent of those rooms in mansions of the European nobility and bourgeoisie that were full of motley objects in a clutter, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen – Rotterdam’s leading cultural institution, which brings together the legacy of the two illus
Based in Rotterdam but running offices in São Paulo and Paris as well, KAAN Architecten was set up by Kees Kaan, Vincent Panhuysen, and Dikkie Scipio as a new professional venture after the 2014 closure of Claus en Kaan, the firm they had worked toge
In a world first, Rotterdam’s Boijmans museum has put its entire collection on display in a mammoth new warehouse...
Headed by Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, and Nathalie de Vries, the Rotterdam-based firm MVRDV has since 1993 pursued a highly daring kind of architecture, radically festive and well distanced from conventionalisms, that has not run out of steam through
The Spanish-Dutch team formed by the practices Estudio Lamela and KAAN Architecten, in collaboration with the engineering firms Ineco and ABT, has won the competition for the commision to enlarge Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, carrying the day over c
deFlat Kleiburg Residential Complex The renovation of the deFlat Kleiburg residential complex in Amsterdam, by the Dutch firms NL Architects and XVW architectuur, has won the biennial Mies van der Rohe Award. The other four finalists were: the Ely Co
The visionary and illusionist work of MVRDV is overwhelming in its prolific variety. The Dutch company has gone from three founding members whose last names give it its name – Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, and Nathalie de Vries – to an international inf
MVRDV’s work takes us to the other side of the looking glass. As is known, much of recent Dutch architecture is effervescently experimental. Tirelessly inventive and imaginatively innovative, we like to think that its roots can be found in the manufa
A version of Herman Hertzberger’s structuralism? An accidental encounter between a villa by Mies van der Rohe and another by Peter Eisenman (as Reinier de Graaf puts it, partner of the ever surreal Rem Koolhaas)? Or a lavish expenditure of a hundred
From afar the Markthal built by MVRDV in Rotterdam might suggest a kind of arch of triumph, a monument of the magnitude of the Baths of Caracalla. But this is just a mirage. As the visitor approaches the central eye of the building, the impression it
The most important Dutch architect of the postwar period combined the large scale with iconic works that showed faith in technique and unbound optimism.
During the late 1980s, the German architect Hans Kollhoff designed and carried out works of great material force, among them Piraeus – a vast flexing brick apartment block located in one of the dockland sites of Amsterdam – and the ascetic mass housi
The Dutch office Mecanoo has recently presented an alternative proposal to generate electricity through wind: the EWICON (standing for ‘electrostratic wind energy converter’). The first prototype has been installed in front of the faculty of Electri
Twelve years have passed since Cruz & Ortiz won the competition for the renovation and enlargement of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. During this time the Sevillian partners have had to deal not only with the predictable – the program’s complexity and t
Bajo una gran pirámide acristalada, una montaña de libros invita a la lectura en una estructura de terrazas apiladas: así es el nuevo edificio de MVRDV para la biblioteca pública de la ciudad de Spijkenisse, a unos 20 kilómetros de Rotterdam. Con una
Con un proyecto desarrollado por MVRDV, la ciudad neerlandesa de Almere —de 170.000 habitantes y construida en la década de 1960 sobre unos terrenos ganados al mar— ha sido seleccionada para acoger la próxima edición de Floriade, la feria internacion
‘Naturalmente diversos’ es el lema de la instalación con la que España participa en la sexta edición de Floriade, la feria internacional de horticultura que, desde 1960, se viene celebrando cada diez años en Holanda, y que puede visitarse en la local
Reinier de Graaf A novel
Wouter Vanstiphout Marta Relats Randstad Holland, Sao Paolo, Istanbul & Rotterdam
Indira van’t Klooster Innovators of Dutch Architecture
Amsterdam 2011
Nai010 Publishers - 175 Pages
Ole Bouman Dutch Designs on the Future
Samir Bantal JaapJan Berg Anne Luijten Kees van der Hoeven
Rotterdam 2009
Nai010 Publishers - 173 Pages
Yearbook 2003-2004
Rem Koolhaas
Colonia 2004
Taschen - 544 Pages