Located within the new Binhai Cultural District, the library provides storage for as many as 1.2 million books on sweeping, terraced bookshelves in the building’s central atrium. At the center of the room, an enormous mirrored sphere houses an auditorium and reflects the miles of bookshelves around it, creating a dazzling atmosphere for reading and studying.
Check out some first looks at the interior from social media below, and be on the lookout for professional photos later this week.
Hoping to answer the question "what does the future city look like?" at Dutch Design Week, MVRDV (definitive design and construction drawings) and think tank The Why Factory (Research and concept design) have fabricated a multicolored, tetris-like hotel in Eindhoven. The future brings decreasing resources, increasing population, and climate change, reasons MVRDV, and with these limitations in mind, they believe futuristic architecture needs one important quality: flexibility.
MVRDV, in collaboration with ISA Architecture, has revealed the designed of the Zhangjiang Future Park, a park and community center for the workers and residents of Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park in Pudong, Shanghai, China. Fully integrated into a rolling park landscape will be a library, an art centre, a performance centre and a sport center – four civic programs that are currently lacking in the neighborhood.
From a pool of over fifty submissions, Resilient by Design have chosen ten winning teams to collaborate with engineers, climate change experts, designers, architects and community members to imagine a better future for The Bay Area in the face of potentially devastating climate change. The winning teams AECOM, BIG, Bionic, TLS, Field Operations, HASSELL, Mithun, Base Landscape, SCAPE and Gensler will spend the next year on a combination of collaborative research projects and site-specific conceptual design solutions.
MVRDV, with co-architects BSK Arkitekter, has revealed the design of Magasin 113, a mixed-use transformation and extension of a 16,500-square-meter riverfront warehouse in Gothenburg, Sweden. Located within the planned Frihamnen RiverCity district – the largest ongoing urban development project in Scandinavia – the building will inject contemporary program in the existing warehouse structure, including flexible office spaces, an arts center, a cafe, pop-up shop spaces, retail shops, a restaurant and artist studios.
MVRDV has broken ground on “Valley” (previously known as P15 Ravel Plaza), a 75,000-square-meter mixed-use building located within the Zuidas business district of Amsterdam. Featuring residential units, offices, parking, a sky bar and retail and cultural space, the building will inject a sense of life and excitement into the neighborhood, transforming the district into a more varied and liveable urban quarter.
Completed in 2016, MVRDV + ADEPT’s Ku.Be House of Culture in Movement has since become a beloved community amenity that encourages residents to participate in a wide range of activities including running, jumping, climbing, dancing, learning and meditating. Engagement in these activities is encouraged by the complex’s dynamic, playful architecture, where brightly colored wall surfaces meet concrete sliding areas meet suspended climbing nets.
This energetic spirit has been captured in a new photo series by Ossip van Duivenbode, where the center’s elements are being enjoying by people of all ages. Check out the full gallery below, and click here to learn more about the project.
MVRDV, in collaboration with local co-architects ACS Integrated and PWA Architects, has broken ground on a 12,000-square-meter mixed-use office block in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Known as the Veranda Offices, the 8-story building draws inspiration from local Sri Lankan weaving patterns, creating a system of flexible interior office spaces that open onto verandas and panoramic glass windows.
MVDRV and SDK Vastgoed (VolkerWessels) have been selected as winners in a competition to design a “progressive residential development” in inner-city Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Known as “Nieuw Bergen”, the complex will offer high-quality, sustainable residences along Deken van Someren Street, helping to establish a “visible sustainability ethos” in the neighborhood of Bergen.
MVRDV has been selected as the winner of a competition for The Sax, a 51-story mixed-use tower in Rotterdam’s Wilhelminapier port development. The building will add a total of 82,000 square meters (882,000 square feet) of residences, retail spaces and commercial facilities across two towers, the Philadelphia & the Havana, connected halfway up by a bridge containing a 150-room hotel.
Located on the south side of Wilhelminapier, the Sax will become one of the last residential buildings to rise within a new development on the historic harbor, one of the city’s most popular areas. The building’s recognizable pixelated silhouette and waterfront siting will give the building an immediate presence on the Rotterdam skyline, recently coined the “Manhattan On the Maas.”
MVRDV have broken ground on a 3,700 square meter creative office project in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Named “Salt,” the new flexible workspace is part of the Minervahaven port redevelopment located on the city’s harbor. Conceived as a response to the lack of flexible workspaces in Amsterdam, Salt aims to provide small, high-quality offices geared towards the demands of creative industries. The building contributes to Minervahaven’s ambition to redefine itself as the city’s new creative hub.
This week a groundbreaking ceremony was held for Tainan Axis, a project by MVRDV, and local architects The Urbanist Collaborative and LLJ Architects that is set to offer the Taiwanese city a revitalized plaza and green corridor. William Lai, the Mayor of Tainan, joined the Urban Development Bureau of Tainan City and the local architects to mark the beginning of construction.
The international Prix Versailles Committee has announced the recipients of its annual awards celebrating built commercial architecture. The awards were held at the UNESCO World Headquarters, with recipients hailing from 6 regions around the world. Chaired by the Mayor of Versailles François de Mazières, the international jury included architects Manuelle Gautrand, Toyo Ito, Wang Shu, and acclaimed chef Guy Laroche.
The 12 World Titles are awarded in 4 top categories: stores, shopping malls, hotels and restaurants. The winners were selected from a diverse range of 70 regional winners already present in the ceremony.
MVRDV and local architects Flint have revealed designs for a new riverfront mixed-use housing complex in Bordeaux, Ilot Queyries, as the project breaks ground. Located on the east bank of Garonne River, the site will house over 300 apartments, retail spaces, a rooftop restaurant, and a communal park in a densely mixed environment. The complex will integrate into the neighboring ZAC Bastide-Niel masterplan by MVRDV to create a lively urban neighborhood aimed at “combining the virtues of the historic city–intimacy, surprise and liveliness– with the density, ecology, light and comfort of the modern city.”
#donotsettle is an online video project created by Wahyu Pratomo and Kris Provoost about architecture and the way it is perceived by its users. Having published a number of videos on ArchDaily over the past two years, Pramoto and Provoost are now launching an exclusive column, “#donotsettle extra,” which will accompany some of their #donotsettle videos with in-depth textual analysis of the buildings they visit.
“The office has an easy-going mood and relaxing atmosphere. That’s why we call it The House,” says Jacob van Rijs, one of MVRDV's founders, when he brought #donotsettle into his office.
For architecture, an industry that is famous for long workdays, the office can potentially be a stressful environment. Van Rijs explains how the office could have a significant impact upon people's psychology, as they spend a large part of their life there. The MVRDV House has broken the rigid office typology, and made it more entertaining.
Today the Mayor of Seoul opened the Skygarden, a 983-meter elevated walkway designed by MVRDV which utilizes a formerly abandoned highway in the center of the South Korean capital. Located in Seoul's Central Station district, the 16-meter-high linear park features a living catalog of Korea's indigenous plants, featuring over 24,000 individual plants from 228 species and sub-species. The Skygarden is known in Korean as Seoullo 7017, a name which references the Korean for "Seoul Street," and the 1970 and 2017, the years in which the structure was originally built and subsequently transformed.
From the publishers. The April 2017 issue of a+u is devoted to the work of MVRDV, the architectural office based in the Netherlands. This is the third of the MVRDV FILES series by a+u, following MVRDV FILES 1 in 2002 and MVRDV FILES 2 in 2007.
MVRDV and developer Provast has revealed plans for a two new mixed-use residential towers in The Hague that will add over 500 new apartments to the city’s Central Business District. Located on Grotiusplaats adjacent to the National Library and near the city’s Central Station, the “Grotius Towers” will offer 61,800 square meters of residential and commercial space to service the needs of The Hague’s growing downtown core.
The towers’ design reacts to the typical tower typology found in the Hague by focusing on high-quality details, a subtle facade, a ‘soft’ landing on the street and a ‘crown’ of large outdoor spaces. Inside, a mix of social housing and private accommodations will ensure the buildings are inhabited by a diverse community, while their ground-floor commercial plinths will make the complex a destination for shopping, dining and socializing.
