MVRDV – Between Practice and Research
19:00 - 19:30
La Centrale, Nuvola Lavazza
Winy Maas is a Founding Partner, urban planner, and Landscape Architect who has led the interdisciplinary engine of MVRDV since its inception, shaping a practice where research, experimentation, and urban responsibility converge into built form and visionary agendas. As a professor and founder of The Why Factory at TU Delft, he transforms pedagogy into a public laboratory, producing models and scenarios that challenge how cities might grow, adapt, and regenerate in the face of planetary change.
At Utopian Hours 2025, Maas brings this double register—practice and research—into one conversation: the city as a designed ecosystem, and architecture as an accelerant of collective futures, from super-compact living to porous, green, user-shaped spaces. His trajectory with MVRDV spans emblematic projects that have reframed typologies and public life: from the stacked Dutch Pavilion at Expo 2000 and the radical WoZoCo housing, to Rotterdam’s Markthal, the reflective Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, and the living-topography of Valley in Amsterdam, each fusing social ambition with material and spatial invention.
This year in Venice, Maas extends that inquiry with Biotopia at the Biennale’s Arsenale—a 3D-printed collaboration with The Why Factory and artist Federico Díaz that speculates on a “global sponge” architecture able to cool air, filter water, generate energy, and adapt like a living organism, recasting cities as cultivated ecologies rather than inert objects. In parallel, MVRDV’s kinetic SOMBRA pavilion at Marinaressa evolves with the sun via air-pressure actuation—shade as behavior, structure as climate interface—underscoring a shift from infrastructure to organism in the studio’s current work.
Maas arrives in Turin with a question that has long animated his practice: why build, and for whom—then pushes it forward, asking how the next city can be more experimental, more public, and more alive.
Winy Maas is a Dutch architect, urban planner, and landscape architect, Founding Partner of MVRDV, and professor at TU Delft, where he founded The Why Factory think tank. His distinctions include the Order of the Netherlands Lion and the French Legion of Honor, alongside Honorary Fellowship of the AIA, reflecting global recognition for leadership in architecture and urbanism. He frequently serves on international juries and advisory boards.
