What Will Future Cities Look Like? A Dutch Architect Has Three Bold Answers

"Simply copying European architecture onto China, a country with an ancient civilization, would be meaningless — you could even call it a kind of sin."

What will future cities look like?

More than one film director and more than one science-fiction writer have tried to answer this question, which faces all of humanity. But next to the boundless imaginings of novels and films, the ideas of the people who actually build cities — architects — may be worth more.

The architect Winy Maas, and MVRDV, the firm he co-founded, have turned out a long line of wildly inventive buildings.

The firm, set up in the Netherlands in 1993, arrived in public view with a piece of sideways thinking: on an elderly-housing project in Amsterdam, it took the units the foundations could not carry and stuck them onto the facade. That became the first rough version of its "castle in the air" idea, and it fixed MVRDV's role in the industry as an innovator.

In the projects that followed, MVRDV pushed further: it stacked a produce market and a high-rise apartment block into one building, stretched green space upward, planted gardens on roofs, claimed living space out of thin air, and built outdoor "sky ladders." In form, in materials, in the way it combines the spaces a building needs, MVRDV seems better than any other firm at breaking the rules.

In fact, to Winy Maas, these odd-looking buildings are not stunts meant to draw a crowd. They come out of one belief — "a building should always start from the place it stands in and the needs of the people who use it; form matters much less" — and out of the whole team's research, analysis and step-by-step reasoning about the city each building belongs to.

Winy Maas was born in the Netherlands in 1959. MVRDV opened in 1993 and won its first commission straight away: the headquarters of VPRO, the Dutch public broadcaster, in Hilversum. The WoZoCo housing block, finished in 1997, and the Dutch Pavilion at the 2000 Hanover Expo then truly opened doors for the firm and turned it, step by step, into a studio the world watches.

At Business of Design Week in Hong Kong in early December, Winy Maas gave a talk on "future cities," spreading once again his bold picture of a city that is more open, more forward-looking and easier to live in.

He offered three visions.

A "Transparent City" Without Limits

Glass is one of the materials MVRDV reaches for most often. The Market Hall in Rotterdam, with its 40-by-40-meter glass windows; Glass Farm, whose facade glass is printed with local history; Crystal Houses, built from Venetian glass bricks; the "Infinity Kitchen" at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale — in each of them glass, handled in a different way, carries the building.

Asked about this fondness for the material, Winy Maas said the apparent obsession comes from the way he thinks about architectural space and function, and from a theoretical experiment with the idea of green building.

In June 2016, MVRDV finished the Glass Office at 133 Wai Yip Street in Hong Kong, an office building converted from an old factory. Land in Hong Kong is expensive, so MVRDV worked to make an office that pulls people in and feels open, and to make working there as comfortable as possible. The old building was stripped back to the bare structure, which has a beauty of its own; every unnecessary finish came off. The only infill materials are white paint, glass and stainless steel, chosen to keep that basic structure clean and to show it off. New and old stay clearly apart, and the inside of the building is put on view for the public.

Inside, the desks, the shelves, the floor, the speakers, the computers and the walls are all made of glass; there is nowhere the eye cannot reach. The glass leaves the building using 17% less energy over a year than the Hong Kong office average, and drawing 15% less power at peak. The most extreme piece of transparent architecture built so far, the Glass Office also carries Winy Maas's thinking about how Hong Kong was built and how people live in it now.

"We are moving toward a transparent society, where companies are more open with the public and the public cares more about what goes on behind closed doors. Seen that way, a transparent working environment hides no problems, and that builds trust," Maas said. "At the same time, this glass building keeps reminding people of the industrial history of the area."

Asked to describe glass, Maas chose the word "fascinating." To him it does more than cut the energy spent on heating and lighting; it is a way toward a more open, more transparent city. "I hope that when I walk down a street in Hong Kong, I can see straight through every building to the other end of the city, and see 'infinity.' That is my dream — a dream about infinity," he said.

When a dream lands, though, it runs into problems nobody saw coming. For Crystal Houses, built for Chanel, MVRDV stacked the whole facade out of glass bricks and used as much glass as it could indoors, wanting a glass box you could see through from either side. How to protect a customer's privacy, and how to move naturally from a transparent space into a private one such as a fitting room, became the new puzzle. "If we really want a fully transparent city," Maas joked, "I'm afraid all our clothes will have to be made of mirrored material."

Living in the Sky

Beyond the "rooms in the air" at WoZoCo, there is Sky Village in Denmark and there are the courtyard houses in the air from the exhibition "The Next Hutong" — all of them continuations of MVRDV's idea of spreading living space sideways through the air.

"The Next Hutong" was a plan for renovating Beijing's hutongs that MVRDV showed at the 2014 exhibition "South City Plan — Qianmen East District 2014." Taking the courtyard house, or siheyuan, as its module, it raised, lowered, sliced, stacked and merged that unit into 1,700 different schemes. The models of these inventive courtyard combinations hung at 1:15 scale above the open courts of real siheyuan, forming a bright web of courtyards over the East District. MVRDV's China office told QDaily that the project has reached an early stage at Xianyukou Hutong in Beijing, but that talks with the district's administrators have gone less smoothly than hoped, and that renovation rules have added many limits to getting it built. Whether the courtyard houses in the air will ever exist is, for now, an open question.

In 2016, the Stairway to Kriterion put MVRDV back in the middle of public debate.

This large installation, built to mark 75 years since the city began rebuilding after the war, stood outside the entrance to Rotterdam Central Station and climbed to the top of the Groot Handelsgebouw, one of the city's important historic buildings. Through this "sky ladder," Winy Maas wanted to show people a new possibility: open up the roofs of buildings, break the usual way one floor connects to the next, and the next generation of cities gains a new urban ground — more interactive, three-dimensional and more complex.

"In 20 years of researching and thinking about urban design, we have found that cities, high-density ones above all, need to open up a 'second layer' of space. Most densely populated cities are full of high-rises, where people come and go in a single motion: in and out. In many tall buildings you have to go inside before you have any chance of reaching the roof, and most of the time people don't go up there on their own. Our idea was to put a ladder, the ordinary kind everyone knows, on the outside of the building, running from the ground straight to the roof. The roof becomes an open space at once, and more people will want to climb up." So it turned out: residents were more than willing to take the sky ladder to the roof, to look out over the city, to eat in the rooftop restaurant, or to exercise and rest in the open air.

A New Kind of Community Built Around Shared Space

In his most recent book, Winy Maas imagines a "Crazy Tower" drawn from Hong Kong's buildings and history — a small shared community meant for dense, fast-growing cities.

"In Asian cities today — Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai — land and housing cost a fortune and building rules are strict," Maas said in an interview. "So if my flat is only 60 square meters but I want as much use of public space as I can get, or want city services from shared spaces and facilities, what do I do? And given that, what should my room look like? What can be simplified and improved in the living room, the bathroom and the kitchen? How do we keep the view open? These are the questions Crazy Tower tries to answer." If it were ever built, he added, other high-density cities could learn from it.

MVRDV has in fact already put the idea of a shared community into a finished project, Tianjin TEDA. The development keeps the traditional grain of a Chinese city and brings in a modern version of the hutong, and it also opens up its blocks, giving residents public space to practice calligraphy, do tai chi and exercise.

"Simply copying European architecture onto China, a country with an ancient civilization, would be meaningless — you could even call it a kind of sin. We put the emphasis on talking and exchanging ideas with our clients, so that a mix of international and Chinese elements produces outstanding innovation instead."

That passage, from the firm's own website, sums up MVRDV's attitude to work outside the Netherlands. For Western architects the China of the past decade has clearly been full of both opportunity and difficulty. Rapid urbanization has made the country's governments, developers and property companies more open to design ideas born in other places and other contexts.

Buildings such as the CCTV headquarters and the Bird's Nest, Maas said, showed him how much more could be done in China. He would like to help solve the environmental problems Chinese cities face now — polluted water in Shanghai's old districts, smog in Beijing — and to help work out new models for cities and for farming.

Look back at MVRDV's China record, though, and its first attempts did not take to the soil. It lost, again and again: Vanke's Shenzhen headquarters, the Guangming New Town master plan, "4 Tower in 1" in central Shenzhen, the competition for a three-dimensional street in Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei. Its free-flying imagination and exaggerated forms turned out to be the biggest obstacle to its growth in the Chinese market.

Later, on the strength of its own research and analysis of dense Chinese cities, and after adjusting its strategy, MVRDV gradually found ways to talk to Chinese clients, and spread its projects to Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Hong Kong and elsewhere.

Images: MVRDV and BODW