MVRDV - Innovation, Utility, Play, Future

Perpetually a week behind, I just finished a fascinating article from last week's New York Times Magazine about MVRDV, a collective of architects who are innovatively pushing the conventional aesthetic and theoretical boundaries of building design.  This sounds fairly un-revolutionary I know, but what's so intriguing about this Dutch firm is that their doing so not in the sense of some linear, post-post-modernism, 'artistic' movement or style, but from the perspective of practical function and solution in the face of new and growing challenges (such as the looming tipping point of urban dwellers outnumbering rural ones, especially in developing countries) and through approaching the concept of constructed space and human habitation in radically and fundamentally novel ways.  Yet visual appeal and amenities aren't simply thrown out either; these new lines that MVRDV architects are drawing merely re-conceptualize the way that spacial limits and lifestyle traditionally interact.

"When MVRDV begins a project, it starts by assembling information on all the conceivable factors that could play a role in the site’s design and construction — everything from zoning laws, building regulations and technical requirements to client wishes, climatic conditions and the political and legal history of the site. Architects often view these rules and regulations as bureaucratic foils to their creativity. MVRDV sees them as the wellspring of invention. In fact, believing that subjective analysis and “artistic” intuition can no longer resolve the complex design problems posed by the ever-metastisizing global city, the architects sometimes use a home-built software program called Functionmixer. When loaded with all the parameters of a particular construction project, Functionmixer crunches the numbers to show optimal building shapes for any given set of priorities (maximizing sunlight, say, or views, or privacy) and pushes limits to the extreme, where they can be seen, debated and, often, thoroughly undone. It creates a datascape that is the basis of the design. 

In 1994, for instance, MVRDV was asked to build housing for the elderly — an apartment block with 100 units — in an already densely developed suburb of Amsterdam. Because of height regulations and the need to provide adequate sunlight for residents, only 87 of the called-for units could fit within the site’s restricted footprint. Rather than expand horizontally and consume more of the neighborhood’s green space, MVRDV borrowed a page from its “vertical suburbia” and hung the remaining 13 apartments off the side. Their wonderfully odd WoZoCos housing complex takes the conventional vertical housing block and reorganizes it midair with these bulging extensions that seem to be levitating right up off the ground."

The article's first few pages are a bit slow, but the remainder of the piece is worth the perseverance.  Click here to view the article.  There's also a great and related slideshow available here.