MVRDV

The market square becomes the Market Cube! 🔳 We won the competition to design a new public building in Zhubei combining a market and food hall with cultural spaces.

With our co-architect EKUO, we studied the history of market typologies, from roadside vegetable trucks and market squares to the supermarkets and food courts of today. With its stack of open, flexible floors that can adapt to changing demands, the Market Cube acts as an urban condenser, and is envisaged as the next step in this evolution.

Thanks to its simplicity and flexibility, the building – also known locally as River Bank 1 – will easily adapt to the unpredictable changes of the coming decades, extending its lifespan and avoiding costly and unsustainable alterations to the structure for as long as possible. The external circulation elements allow the floorplans to be entirely free, while floor-to-floor heights for most levels are five metres, or a full eight metres for the market and exhibition floors. These high ceilings allow for almost any alternative use imaginable.

Read more about the project here: https://lnkd.in/eqA4Ktvw

Domus has selected Mirador as one of the 10 most significant architectural works of the 21st century!
 
Their slideshow article highlights projects that provide a response to the challenges of the first quarter of the century, noting Mirador for the “fight against social inequalities through the conquest of the right to quality housing”. 
 
Mirador is a collection of mini neighbourhoods stacked vertically around a semi-public sky-plaza in Madrid. The building acts as a counterpoint against the massive uniformity of the surrounding housing blocks. It frames the distant landscape of the Guadarrama Mountains through a large “lookout” located 40 metres above the ground. This also provides outdoor space and community garden for the occupants of building, monumentalising public life and space.
 
Read the article in Domus here: https://lnkd.in/eaTJuR_G
Or more on Mirador here: https://lnkd.in/gjiP_Qaw

The people reclaim the monument: MVRDV’s Pyramid of Tirana was just inaugurated!

In the heart of Albania’s capital city, a new kind of cultural hub is now open and accessible to the public. The Pyramid of Tirana, originally built as a museum dedicated to the communist dictator Enver Hoxha, has been dramatically transformed by MVRDV. Reusing the concrete structure, the Pyramid is now an open sculpture in a new park. The park and the sculpture are home to an ensemble of colourful boxes, scattered in and around the original building that now house cafés, studios, workshops, start-up offices, incubators, festivals, and classrooms where Albanian youth will learn various technology subjects for free. Steps have been added to the building’s sloping façades, allowing the people of Albania to literally walk all over the showpiece of the former dictator.

As Mark Rutte, Prime Minister of the Netherlands, mentioned: “This is an extraordinary symbol, a symbol for Albania, especially when you understand, as mentioned before, that it was originally planned for Enver Hoxha. However, it is also a silent witness to a country that has decided to embark on the path of progress and has done so, especially today.“!

Photographs Ossip van Duivenbode
Read more on the project here: https://lnkd.in/eSUqdcXC

Designed for adaptability: a future-proof, mixed-use district in downtown Kyiv!
 
MVRDV and Orange Architects have revealed their designs for three buildings that will form part of NUVO, a new complex to be constructed in the commercial and business centre of Ukraine’s capital.
 
NUVO merges a business park with residential and cultural programmes to establish the most extensive technological and sustainable development in Ukraine. Commissioned by Kovalska, the work on the plan, which began before war broke out, is being restarted, with Orange Architects and MVRDV closely collaborating to refine the masterplan initially created by APA Wojcehowski Architects. 
 
“We are humbled and proud to be able to contribute to a project that will play a significant role in Kyiv’s daily life”, says MVRDV founding partner Jacob van Rijs. “In creating flexible and demountable spaces, we have designed spaces that can more easily respond to society’s changing needs and help ameliorate uncertainty brought on by the ongoing conflict. Workers of all types will have access to high-quality offices, while communal areas including green rooftops enable new connections to be forged while providing new perspectives of this vital city.”

Read more about the project here: https://lnkd.in/eGC5j9b4

The construction of Expo 2.0 in Hannover is rapidly advancing! Jacob van Rijs took his students of the Technische Universität Berlin to check out the progress. 👷‍♂️👷‍♀️

Expo 2.0 is a transformation of one of MVRDV’s own seminal projects, the Dutch Pavilion at the 2000 World Expo in Hannover. The project will convert the former Expo Pavilion into a co-working office building, and two new buildings with student housing will be added on the space surrounding the pavilion.

The design maintains the qualities – including the forest on the 3rd floor – that made the pavilion an icon of the 2000 World Expo and reinterprets the original project’s concept for the two new buildings.

Read more on the project here! https://lnkd.in/dMkhHYq

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