Architecture Firm UNstudio Asks: If We Reorganize How We Live, Can Ordinary People Get a Voice?

And what role should technology play in that?

In 2017, the Australian developer Beulah bought a plot of land in Melbourne's Southbank business district. It then ran a large open competition to solicit designs for a mixed-use commercial tower, drawing entries from top architecture firms worldwide, including MAD and BIG.

In the end, a twin-tower design called “Green Spine” beat out five other finalists. The towers' form resembles a twisting DNA strand — one side a pixelated glass curtain wall, the other a stepped, shrub-covered surface running all the way to the roof. This Hanging-Gardens-of-Babylon approach is catching on worldwide; you can see traces of it in Stefano Boeri's famous "vertical forest" and in Ho Chi Minh City's "sky forest."

Green Spine is projected to cost 2 billion Australian dollars. Once built, its tallest point will reach 356.2 meters, easily breaking the record set by the Q1 tower on Queensland's Gold Coast in 2005, making it the tallest building not just in Australia but in the entire Southern Hemisphere.

Beyond the usual apartments and hotel rooms, the lower floors will include retail space, a school, a daycare center, a library, and a cinema, plus a public garden on the roof — an entire city's worth of functions unfolding vertically.

Twenty thousand kilometers away, in the southern Netherlands, another "city" is being planned.

This time, the designers face an entirely different question: if you could use technology to design a city from scratch, what would the community and the city look like?

Over the next decade, on a plot of land in the Dutch city of Helmond larger than 320 soccer fields, such a city will rise: a place where people grow their own food, generate their own energy, manage their own waste, and control their own data.

1,500 homes will spread out around a central park, surrounded by 12 hectares of commercial and recreational space. The landscape won't just be scenery — it will also produce food, energy, and water. Residents will be largely self-sufficient, living inside a tight loop of recycled resources.

The plan envisions it as “the smartest community in the world” — a living laboratory. A small core area will host a live experiment called "100 Houses": treating 100 homes as a microcosm of society, in a controlled test environment used to explore both the economics and the ethics of treating data as currency.

The Green Spine towers and the Dutch smart community called Brainport are utterly different in scale and concept, but the core design behind both comes from the same firm: UNstudio.

This long-established Dutch firm was founded in 1988 and now works across three continents, with clients from more than 30 countries. In 2008, it designed the streamlined towers of Raffles City Hangzhou, and the following year opened UNStudio Asia's first office, in Shanghai.

On one hand, there's a distinctly Dutch pragmatism at work; on the other, as protégés of Zaha Hadid, its founders' style bears her influence — fluid lines with a poetic quality.

Like Hadid, UNstudio's portfolio consists mostly of megaprojects — towers, arenas, bridges. And despite a decade in the Asian market, it remains caught, like other large architecture firms, in the same cycle of homogeneous design competitions.

Under the pressure of capital and technology, the room for traditional architectural expression keeps shrinking. The emergence of Brainport signals that, after more than three decades of commercial and public-building work, UNstudio has begun looking toward future spaces — searching for architecture that won't become obsolete as the times change, and for new footing of its own as a designer of large-scale buildings.

Imagining the architecture of the future is an evergreen topic. Some say future buildings will be lighter and more flexible; others say they'll hew closer to natural landscapes; still others keep "environmentally friendly" and "sustainable" on constant repeat. Caroline Bos, one of UNstudio's founders, chose a different word at the Mindpark conference in Shenzhen: "circular."

That may sound like just another buzzword. But beyond the term itself, she told QDaily, the core question they're grappling with is whether future architecture can let ordinary people reclaim a role in shaping their own living space.

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Caroline Bos was born in the Netherlands. As a girl, she often visited her aunt in the capital.

The chaos of Amsterdam in the 1960s and '70s left a deep impression on her: the counterculture movement was at its peak, hippies slept in the streets downtown, and parks, squares, and campuses were taken over by excited crowds and protesters. At the same time, theaters, galleries, museums, and other cultural institutions of every kind were springing up.

She described the experience in a TED talk: "For me, this is the essence of chaos — it's the combination of everything happening right here, right now. When thousands of people gather in a city, they generate a remarkable energy, and that energy gives the city its own spontaneous order."

That formative experience still shapes how Bos thinks about cities today. "It's very different from living in a village or the suburbs. A city is shaped by people, and its unpredictability is what makes it vibrant. That's why people have always been drawn to cities — they offer choice and freedom. You can redefine yourself."

"And we don't want planning to snuff that vitality out."

Four hundred years ago, visionary planners carved out Amsterdam's radial canal system; that spectacular network still largely determines the city's character and how it grows today — "free, bold, and creative," in Bos's words.

When urban expansion and population growth arrived alongside the chaos of the 1960s, the city government adopted a policy of low-density construction and encouraged affordable rental housing, letting green belts expand alongside new development. Urbanization proceeded at an orderly pace, while still leaving room for a diverse population to remake itself.

Both founders were trained as architects in the UK, and that pragmatic belief — that architecture should stay as close as possible to how people actually live — runs through the firm's whole character. For Bos, "how we live in cities" may be the single most important question architecture faces.

Bos didn't come up through architectural design; she started with the history and theory of architecture. After she and her husband, Ben van Berkel, met in London, the two of them returned to Amsterdam together to found UNstudio.

She has been called UNstudio's "secret weapon," because as an "outsider" to the discipline, she was often able to challenge preconceptions baked into traditional architecture and bring an outside perspective to the firm's designs.

One of those was a strong urban-planning perspective. In her view, a building never exists apart from its surroundings, especially against the backdrop of rapid global urbanization. She later went on to train further and became a registered planner herself; three or four years ago, urban planning became a formal department at UNstudio.

To this day, the Netherlands has stayed at the forefront of experimental architecture — partly a product of its own physical circumstances.

Rick van der Ploeg, then the Dutch State Secretary for Culture and Media, once explained UNstudio's success, and that of many Dutch design brands, this way: "We don't have much land in the Netherlands, which is why we want to invest as much as possible in our surroundings. In a sense, architects and designers are the heroes of this new era."

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As an architecture firm, UNstudio drew attention early on for a string of infrastructure projects.

One of the studio's earliest and most celebrated designs is the Erasmus Bridge, a landmark sky-blue span across the Meuse River connecting the north and south of Rotterdam. Built in 1996 at a cost of $342 million, the bridge is nicknamed "the Swan" by locals for its asymmetric, elegant structure.

It also functions as a highly complete piece of transit infrastructure, with two pedestrian paths, two bike lanes, tram tracks, and lanes for cars.

Arnhem Centraal, completed in 2015, is a more mature and complex example. The new station took 20 years, start to finish, to build. It's one of the main rail hubs linking Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium, and once finished, it became the city's largest postwar reconstruction project.

Arnhem Centraal is visually striking: it has more than 20,000 square meters of terminal space, a distinctive curved interior, column-free spans of up to 60 meters, and spaces that flow smoothly into one another.

But what makes this station, often called "future-facing," truly distinctive is how effectively it works as infrastructure.

From the outset, the designers set "not going out of date" as a goal. In UNstudio's understanding, that doesn't mean a cutting-edge, fashionable look — it means serving today's residents while also being able to adapt to the needs of tomorrow's.

As they discovered, "When we studied the project's potential, we realized it defied people's prior assumptions entirely. A traditional train station, as an institutional, civic landmark, became redundant long ago." The real question decision-makers faced was how to give more say to the daily flow of people passing through, and to the events that space could host.

So rather than treating the building as a landmark, the design's core idea became how to make it functionally suited to the surrounding development and transit needs.

As architects, they often surprise clients with how much they know about the statistics behind surrounding infrastructure. Analyzing the transit network, they found that only 40% of the people passing through were actually there to catch a train. So they placed the bus stop at the front of the station and gave passengers a unified fare system with seamless access to the rail platforms.

The new station ended up as a transfer hub for multiple modes of public transit, with a hall containing a service area, shops, a conference center, and underground parking, and direct connections to the city center and a public park.

As CityLab pointed out, unlike many designs that chase a kind of "purism," UNstudio pragmatically set aside space in the original design for shops that might move in later — rather than idealistically designing a grand, empty hall that would later get carved up by ill-fitting commercial tenants once it opened.

The building's internal "twist" is also meant to slow its aging as much as possible — the column-free open space holds many possibilities, letting future architects repurpose the facility rather than having to tear it down and start over.

UNstudio doesn't like talking about style, or about aesthetics; it prefers to discuss, case by case, how well each building adapts to its local context. Its projects tend to take on wildly different forms as a result, though certain elements keep recurring.

Green Spine, a commercial project, carries forward that same eye they've developed as builders of public infrastructure.

The ground floor, podium, and its rooftop garden are open not just to the tower's residents but to visitors as well. The stepped design, according to the project description, "creates porosity at street level, while linking the upper floors back to the streetscape by extending the public realm" — meaning they're trying to draw visitors up onto the platforms, turning the building into a three-dimensional extension of public space.

In the future, the podium's terraces are expected to host pop-up performances, sculpture, light installations, and exhibitions. "At street level, this scheme demonstrates the qualities to genuinely transform the public realm," Beulah executive director Adelene Teh said in a statement.

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Designing infrastructure taught them how different parts of a city connect to one another, and how the people living in it relate to the buildings around them.

But infrastructure and urban planning, in the traditional sense, seem to be disappearing.

Van Berkel voiced this worry in a 2011 conversation with the Architectural League of New York: "Now maybe there's only architecture and politics left, because urban planning has largely been taken over by developers. That's certainly the case in Europe."

He said infrastructure has always been tightly bound up with social and political structures, shaping every part of architectural design. "Think about the way Victorian churches were laid out, with separate entrances for men and women, and a separate door for the clergy. Or think about how Manhattan's power grid works, and the particular relationship it creates between production, consumption, and high finance."

Over the past decade or more, architecture has become a kind of hegemony over aesthetics and lifestyle, and the public's voice has grown fainter and fainter. Critics complain, on one hand, that buildings have become too fashion-driven and showy, and on the other, that designers idealize a building's actual function — so that once it's in use, the results often fall short of what was promised.

UNstudio's design for a new campus at a Singapore university drew the same criticism. The integrated design, critics said, "might look great in renderings," but was poorly suited to the tropical climate and had terrible soundproofing.

"Over the past few years, we've seen a lot of top-down master plans full of grand visions," Ren Yee told QDaily. "But a lot of them just don't work."

Last year, UNstudio set up an independent technology division, UNsense — a technology-development company that employs data scientists and programmers and works with neuroscientists, sociologists, economists, and other specialists, exploring how technology can improve interior design, buildings, and cities, and make architecture healthier and smarter. Ren Yee heads UNsense.

In his view, the lesson to draw from those old top-down master plans is: "We didn't actually understand the people who live here."

The biggest impact of the tech revolution on architecture is that space is no longer a fixed, physical concept but something fluid and virtual. As space gets reorganized, can ordinary people gain more of a say in it?

At least, that's what he hopes.

In Ren Yee's vision, the city of the future should have a strong current of grassroots power running through it, with residents taking a more direct part in planning and building, striking a balance between top-down and bottom-up forces.

New communication and data technologies make that vision possible. Public participation has become far easier than before — people can give feedback on their surroundings much faster, and "the city will become more responsive."

"If you look at the latest Tesla, it might have hundreds of sensors," van Berkel told Dezeen when UNsense launched. "But an ordinary building might have just three."

What they envision, still against a backdrop of rapid urbanization, is a more flexible, adaptable building structure — one that can change along with the size and makeup of the population living inside it.

The Brainport smart community can be seen as this vision put into practice. Unlike most development projects, Brainport won't follow the usual sequence of design first, construction after; the two will proceed together, developed incrementally according to each resident's needs.

100 Houses runs on an alternative economy built around the principle that "residents and the community should benefit from their own data" — treating "data" as a form of "labor" that can earn rewards or compensation, with users able to take part in a range of community services, including transportation, shared energy production, retail, and food production and distribution, by controlling how their data gets shared.

UNsense has also set up an ethics committee to serve as an objective advisory body, overseeing data control, privacy, regulation, and any commercial interests involved. It will work with Tilburg University to study the feasibility of data exchange as a foundational model.

The idea of building a city out of personal data may still be rare within the architecture industry, but it comes up more and more often among big tech companies — Sidewalk Labs, developed by Google's parent company Alphabet, is one example.

UNstudio insists its role is different from that of the tech giants: "The only thing we're really interested in is the specific patterns of space use that can help us design better." If anything, they want to challenge existing data monopolies and hand control of data back to residents.

Still, there's no denying that people's first, most visceral reaction to new technology is a sense of unfamiliarity and coldness. How many people will actually be able to understand and use the most cutting-edge technology, and whether that will create new hierarchies and new forms of information authority — these are questions UNstudio may have to face down the road.

Bos brought up the Time Well Spent movement led by Tristan Harris, Google's design ethicist, and the way companies like Facebook use software design to make people quickly addicted to others' "attention." "Without the right guiding principles, that same thing could easily start happening in the physical environment too."

"It's like walking a very thin tightrope."

Unlike traditional commercial projects, the returns on technology development and new kinds of community are genuinely hard to predict. Though UNstudio currently receives government and institutional grants for innovative projects, along with some tax breaks, this is still a major investment for the firm.

The scale of that investment reflects UNstudio's sense of crisis about the future of its own industry.

In an age of information overload and rapid change, architecture is no longer just a matter of scenery. But in Bos's view, architecture's role hasn't changed: the best architects have always sought to build better places for people to live and work, not just to express themselves. It's only that, under the pressure of capital and technology, the power they once held is being distributed more and more widely. "That's the only way to keep our profession relevant."

Cover image: the Erasmus Bridge. Banner image: UNstudio's stress-resilience pod. Unless otherwise credited, all images in this article come from UNstudio.

About the MINDPARK Creativity Conference: held in Shenzhen from April 19 to 21, 2019, this year's conference took "Reshaping Consumption" as its theme. It covered Public Design, on city-building and public value creation; New Generation Branding, on the future shape and development of brands; Digital Content, on the relationship between digital technology and content creation; Scenario Experience, on trends in scenario-based consumption; Design-Driven, on how design becomes a force for business transformation; Children's Aesthetic Education, on innovation and aesthetic education for kids; and Creative China, grounded in homegrown innovation.