In the fall of 2002, a young Dutch architect named Winy Maas came to Yale to give a lecture on designing and building the 21st-century city, the challenges of which he illustrated by showing a 30-second video that could have been shot above any American metropolitan airport: a view of the tops of several buildings and then, as the camera rose, more and more buildings, more roads and bridges and asphalt lots, until an ugly concrete skin of low-rise development spread to all horizons.
Maas was not the first architect to protest the unsightly sprawl that humans have left over much of the earth’s surface, but he may have been the first to suggest that we preserve what’s left of our finite planetary space by creating “vertical suburbias” — stacking all those quarter-acre plots into high-rise residential towers, each with its own hanging, cantilevered yard.
“Imagine: It’s Saturday afternoon, and all the barbecues are running,” Maas said, unveiling his design for a 15-story building decked out with leafy, gravity-defying platforms. “You can just reach out and give your upstairs neighbor a beer.”
He turned next to agriculture. Noting that the Dutch pork industry consumes huge swaths of land — Holland has as many pigs as people — Maas proposed freeing up the countryside by erecting sustainable 40-story tower blocks for the pigs. “Look — it’s a pork port,” he said, flashing images from PigCity, his plan for piling up the country’s porcine population and its slaughterhouses into sod-layered, manure-powered skyscrapers that would line the Dutch coast.
Maas is the charismatic frontman for the Rotterdam-based architecture, urban-planning and landscape-design firm known as MVRDV, which brims with schemes for generating space in our overcrowded world. With his messy, teen-idol hair and untucked shirt, Maas strolled the stage extolling the MVRDV credo — maximize urban density, construct artificial natures, let data-crunching computers do the design work — while various mind-bending simulations played across the screen: skyscrapers that tilted and “kissed” on the 30th floor; highways that ran through lobbies and converted into “urban
beaches”; all the housing, retail and industry for a theoretical city of one million inhabitants digitally compressed into the space of a three-mile-high cube.
The Netherlands, prosperous and progressive, has long been one of the world’s leading exporters of architectural talent. By the mid-1990’s, not only
Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture but also a whole new generation of designers — MVRDV, West 8, UNStudio — were trying to enlarge
Le Corbusier’s definition of architecture as the “magnificent play of volumes brought together under light” and arguing for a process driven by research, information and a greater social and environmental awareness. Fighting their battles not just building to building but on a sweeping, citywide scale, Holland’s architects and designers were, in the words of the Dutch culture minister, “heroes of a new age.”
Still, paradigms tend to fall only under pressure, and at the start of the new millennium an audience at the Yale School of Architecture could be forgiven for greeting vertical suburbs, pig cities and the rest of MVRDV’s computer-generated showmanship with the same slack-jawed disbelief that once greeted
Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” or the 1909 Life magazine cartoon that promised an urban utopia of country villas perched atop Manhattan skyscrapers while double-decker airplanes whizzed through their atria.
When Maas came to New Haven, MVRDV was barely 10 years old and had hardly built outside its native Holland. And yet there he was with his straight-faced scheme to “extend the globe with a series of new moons” — send up food-producing satellites that would orbit the earth three times a day. “Can you imagine,” he said with a boyish, science-fair enthusiasm that indulged no irony, “if we grew our tomatoes 10 kilometers high?” On the lecture-hall screen, New York’s skyline appeared just as the MVRDV satellite passed overhead, darkening Gotham with a momentary eclipse of the sun.
Who were these Dutch upstarts? And in the so-called real world, would anything actually become of their grand, improbable visions?
The 45 architects and designers who make up MVRDV (the name is formed by the surname initials of Mass and his two founding partners, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries) work out of a converted, loftlike space in an old printing plant in Rotterdam, a dull but industrious port city whose historic districts were leveled by the Nazis and whose jagged skyline of new office towers and construction cranes attests to its still-restless effort to rebuild.
Inside MVRDV, a liquid northern light pours through a wall of high arched windows, and the occasional cries of foghorns and seagulls confirm its location just blocks from the city’s main shipping lane. But otherwise, the mostly 30-something architects who sit with a slouching intensity at rows of long communal tables, surfing Google Earth or manipulating blue-foam architectural models, seem to have their minds in other places.
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