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.