MVRDV   Albania   Built in 1988 as a museum dedicated to the communist dictator Enver Hoxha, the Pyramid of Tirana has been converted by the Rotterdam firm MVRDV into a cultural center. Located in the heart of the Albanian capital, it has reopened with the original co

MVRDV   Taiwan   The firm MVRDV, in collaboration with LLJ Architects, has built a fruit and vegetable market in the east part of the city of Tainan. Reinventing the typology of markets, the building gives views of the surrounding landscape from an undulating accessi

MVRDV   China   The Rotterdam firm MVRDV has won the competition to build the new central library of Wuhan. With its 140,000 square meters, it seeks to be one of China’s largest libraries. The building opens to reveal activities going on between stepped tiers of boo

MVRDV   China   The Rotterdam firm MVRDV has won the competition to design a residential and shopping complex in the financial district of Jiangbei New Area, an expansion of the Chinese city of Nanjing. The 166,000-square-meter project presents two L-shaped towers,

MVRDV   Germany   At the center of the observance of the 500th anniversary of the Fuggerei social housing complex in Augsburg rises this pavilion built with cross-laminated timber (CLT), a work of MVRDV. It harbors the exhibition ‘Fuggerei of the Future,’ which propos

GRAS Reynés Arquitectos MVRDV   Spain   The metallic structure that is also a vertical forest flanks a floodable central plaza – the Green Hall – surrounded by other programs. The circulations and accesses lead to this plaza, fit out with porous pavements and new urban furniture, lighting

MVRDV   Netherlands   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

MVRDV   Poland   Located in the western Polish city of Wroclaw, which was the German Breslau, the Concordia Design building highlights the Dutch firm MVRDV’s capacity to deal with all kinds of situations. In this case the situation could hardly have been more complic

MVRDV   China   The Rotterdam firm MVRDV has turned a shopping mall built in the 1980s into a public space with a swimming pool in Tainan, a city in the south of the island of Taiwan. Tainan Spring, as the faciity is called, is part of a larger plan to regenerate th

MVRDV   South Korea   Located in the very heart of Seoul, an overpass for vehicles, 16 meters high at its highest and built with steel and reinforced concrete, has been transformed into a huge elevated walkway almost a kilometer long that is part of an ambitious project t

MVRDV   Netherlands   Designed to house a flagship store on PC Hooftstraat – Amsterdam’s luxury brand street, which used to be mainly residential –, this building replaces two traditional houses, transforming their volume to increase the interior space and adapt it to ret

MVRDV   China   Traditional neighborhoods in China, known as hutongs, have for centuries been the standard form of settlement for people that moved from the countryside to the growing cities. With its basic structure of houses around courtyards, the Hutong combines

MVRDV   Netherlands   In contrast with urban plans where the structure is rigid and predictable, the proposal for the development of Almere Oosterwold is based on freedom of both individual and collective initiatives. The area of 43 square kilometers, located at the edge

MVRDV   China   Over the last twenty years, the incredible economic growth of China has led to enormous urbanization, with massive migrations from rural to urban areas. Though impressive in size, most of these urban developments are rather monotonous, lacking divers

MVRDV   Netherlands   Subtracted temporarily from the world wide flow of trade, 3,500 containers are gathered in Rotterdam to form a megacontainer on the scale of the city: the City Container. These containers are used as the envelope – floor, walls, and ceiling – of an i

MVRDV   Netherlands   In 1999, the Netherlands had a population of 15.5 million people and almost the same number of pigs, with 15.2 millions distributed in a total of 16.400 farms. Pig City proposes an alternative solution to the current bio-industry, exploring how to ch

MVRDV   South Korea   Since its construction in the 1970s, the overpass by Seoul’s Central Station connected Namdaemun market with the area located east of the train tracks until safety inspections in 2006 deemed the structure unsafe and intended to demolish and rebuild i

MVRDV   Netherlands   The city of Almere, within the metropolitan area of Amsterdam, is on the verge of experiencing a large population growth geered by urban plans like that of Oosterwold or Almere 2030, which foresees the construction of 60,000 new homes. In this contex

MVRDV   South Korea   Perched high up on a hill close to the city of Anyang, in South Korea, the project is included in a plan developed in 1999 to revitalize the natural environment and attract visitors through a series of artistic interventions. The path leading up to t

MVRDV   Netherlands   Since the year 2001, the center of the Dutch municipality of Zaanstad has been gradually transformed to agree with the style of the nearby UNESCO World Heritage site the Zaanse Schans. The City Hall and Inntel Hotel reinterpret these vernacular forms

COBE Architects MVRDV   Denmark   Located between Roskilde city center and the site where the music festival of the same name takes place yearly, the Rockmagneten is an art and culture center that takes up an old factory. The brief demanded preserving the existing building – already

MVRDV   China   The initiative for a museum especially designed for this relatively recent art form brings the opportunity to create a platform which will unite the worlds of art and entertainment. By using one of the cartoon’s prime characteristics – the speech bal

MVRDV   United Kingdom   Balancing Barn is situated in the English countryside near Thorington in Suffolk. It is a summer residence built for Living Architecture, a company that offers temporary rentals of signature houses, under the motto “Holidays in modern architecture.”

Before they became the property of liberal states – that is, before they became ‘modern’ – museums were simply collections: clutters of artistic objects which sometimes reflected the exquisite tastes of a prince, lord, or dilettante, but always had a

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

Located in the western Polish city of Wroclaw, which was the German Breslau, the Concordia Design building highlights the Dutch firm MVRDV’s capacity to deal with all kinds of situations. In this case the situation could hardly have been more complic

Chinese president Xi Jinping a few years ago lambasted the ‘weird architecture’ that international stars were building in his country (see Arquitectura Viva 169), but his denouncement does not seem to have been much heeded. Otherwise there would be n

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

Laura Fernández Suárez   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

Luis Fernández-Galiano   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

In the presence of the king and queen of Spain and the feel of being at the threshold of turbulent times, the fourth congress organized by the Fundación Arquitectura y Sociedad in collaboration with Arquitectura Viva brought a cast of leading archite

Enrique Encabo   It was in 1997 that MVRDV took the architectural world by storm by presenting, in a few months, four unquestionable works: the cantilevered WoZoCo in Amsterdam, Villa VPRO and the half-buried RVU tablet in Hilversum, and the Double House in Utrecht.

Adela García-Herrera   El mejor libro sobre MVRDV hasta la fecha ha aparecido en 2006, mide 17 x 21 centímetros y tiene 176 páginas. Publicado unos meses antes, en 2005, el último libro ‘de tesis’ del estudio holandés tiene unas medidas parecidas, pero cuenta nada menos qu

Luis Fernández-Galiano   If seen in small images, what sets Jodhpur, the blue oasis in the Indian Rajasthan desert, apart from the famous 1:500 model of the future Shanghai? One could say that color is more important than density in differentiating these two Asian cities, lo

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Nothing expresses the American dream of the 50s as well as the fashion model on the threshold of the Eames house or the paradigmatic marriage grasped by the lens of Julius Shulman in the Case Study House 21 by Pierre Koenig. That domestic and innocen

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Monopoly is a  a construction game, but a real estate game. The winner is whoever man- ages to put houses and hotels in the city’s best areas, bankrupting the other players with his greedy tolls. The colorful wooden prisms, cylinders, pyramids and ar

El País   Luis Fernández-Galiano   The architecture of a Europe that is at present launching a new single currency vacillates between Dutch subversion and Swiss minimalist rigor.

They design it like a chinese puzzle of housing types, gave it the paradoxical title “Berlin Voids”, and won a first prize in Europan. In 1991, after this project, Winy Maas (1959), Jacob van Rijs (1964) and Nathalie de Vries (1965), all Delft gradu

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The flat Netherlands have reached a peak. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company of The Economist which rates the business environment of countries, the Netherlands today are at the top of the list. In this league table, which

Luis Fernández-Galiano   La nueva arquitectura se pliega a las circunstancias. Abandonando las imágenes desafiantes y catastróficas de la deconstrucción, las últimas vanguardias se acomodan al mundo a través de pliegues y dobleces. Si los arquitectos que se reclamaban de Der

Winy Maas   Hacia la ciudad del ocio

Winy Maas Jacob van Rijs Nathalie de Vries   Rotterdam   1998  
Nai010 Publishers   - 736 Pages