Projects

A young family wants a house that is full of paradoxes: simple yet surprising, open yet specific, minimal yet luxurious. With a maximum buildable envelope of three levels, including one subterranean, the architects resolved this paradox with a concept that is based on a radical differentiation of spatial experiences and characters per floor. A house designed for the turmoil of an evolving family – united yet fragmented, plural yet whole.

For the masterplan of the Olympia Quarter, MVRDV invited 20 architects to design a couple of buildings. Powerhouse Company was asked to design an office and a small apartment building, a so-called parasite. Developing an extremely efficient floor plan took some pressure off the tight budget and allowed for Texceptional facades. The office facade is made of 'stone curtains' built from pre-fab elements, the parasite is clad with a dark grey fabric that functions as sunshading.

The Village House is a weekend home for a young family living in Copenhagen. While there is a tendency for summer homes to get bigger and bigger and resemble single-family houses rather than holiday homes, the Village House seeks to distribute its 110 m² in a series of smaller volumes, retrieving the scale of the classic cabin. Its plan spreads across the site like a hand in the grass, creating a diversity of views, sun exposures and terraces, which can be enjoyed all day long. Each window, each roof opening is precisely placed to provide the different rooms of the house with direct sunlight at chosen hours of the day and during every season.

The Erasmus University Rotterdam Student Center, designed together with De Zwarte Hond, is located at the heart of a new masterplan for the university campus. The building has a dynamic facade, not only to adapt to the weather and the cycle of seasons, but also to allow an adjustable level of intimacy inside, depending on the events. By opening or closing the dynamic vertical blinds, users can control how much daylight comes in. The curved lines of the blinds that sweep across the four facades are based on the path of the sun and moderate the amount of natural light and heat according to the position of the sun.

The transparency of the building is preserved by positioning all 'dark space' programmes in the core of the building. This logistical core efficiently serves the publicly accessible spaces distributed around it. On top of this logistical core is a multi-purpose auditorium that offers space for lectures, performances and debates.