Dutch Pavilion Ecology, Congestion, Population Density, The Relationship Between Natural

Dutch Pavilion Ecology, congestion, population density, the relationship between natural and artificial: these are the themes addressed by MVRDV of Holland in their Dutch Pavilion for Expo 2000 in Hanover. The Dutch Pavilion takes concepts of design and investigation of the city begun in previous years into greater depth and is one of the main emblems of the practice's great vitality and ability to innovate, qualities its members have demonstrated in addressing the theme of new urban design since the '90s. Here the architectural idiom acts as a go-between, a filter through which to propose new solutions to the problems of pollution, depletion of natural resources, congestion and liveability in our cities. The pavilion emphasises the relationship between natural and artificial from the formal point of view too, by juxtaposing and overlapping opaque and clear materials, greenery and technology, areas open to the outside and others which are closed off. In this "assemblage" we find the particular vocabulary of MVRDV, which developed building types based on the juxtaposition and combination of different elements in the '90s and has continued to apply them since. But in Hanover it is the landscape architecture that truly stands out, with its particular function of forging the environment. The pavilion structure is in fact characterised by six different overlapping concepts of landscape. From the ground floor, a "dune landscape" takes us to a "greenhouse landscape", a space in which nature, and above all agricultural produce, reveal their strong link with life even in today's high tech world. In the "pot landscape", large vases contain the roots of trees on the upper level, while screens and digital images express messages in light and colour. "Rain landscape" is dedicated to water, which becomes a screen and a support for audiovisual messages; large tree trunks populate the "forest landscape", while at the top of the building a "polder landscape" contains large wind vanes and a big green area WoZoCo Apartments WoZoCo's bizarre, truly surprising profile is in actual fact a result of one of the first hurdles encountered in the project: Cornelis Van Eesteren's urban development plan - dating back to the late '20s - set a limit of 87 apartments per block to ensure that each one of them would be adequately lit. But the client had requested 100 units. Where to put the remaining 13' It was clear that building two blocks would have occupied more land, taking it away from the greenery exactly the attitude the complex was intended to combat. This is what inspired the idea that made WoZoCo's one of the most original apartment buildings in contemporary architecture: the thirteen "extra" units were literally hung off the northern façade of the main building, like big jutting parallelepipeds, doing away with the need to occupy any additional land. The resulting design is ingenious, plastic, brightly coloured. It might remind one of a Mondrian painting in which the geometry of the coloured planes abandons the two dimensions to take on volume, or a chessboard with raised squares, all at different offset heights. The jutting girders are fit and connected with the main block inside the walls of these "extruded" volumes, which were built 8 cm thicker than originally planned for acoustic reasons. This lightens the load-bearing structure. While it is the jutting boxes that add movement to the compositional scene, the building also has a series of windows and balconies, all differing in size, shape, colour and materials. The balconies in particular repeat the jutting theme,

extending out in depth rather than in width, with an irregular course of variable extension. The heterogeneity of these signs composes an overall picture which is balanced, despite the apparent instability of the suspended parallelepipeds, of great visual impact and strong urban and architectural character. WoZoCo's defeats the monolithic, flat, compact architecture of the grey housing blocks of the '60s and replaces it with a form of urban quality made up of movement, light, colour, plasticity, variety and variability.