The Architecture Issue - Crowded House - MVRDV - Architecture - NYTimes.com - The Diigo Meta page

• 14 Jun 08
  

  megcurran
• 10 Jun 08
  

  Jordan Wirfs-Brock

  artificial environment maas architecture design dutch MVRDV skyscraper tunnel urban landscape

  • 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.
  • 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.

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