In collaboration with The Why Factory and MVRDV, 25 students from five different cities across Russia gathered for a four-day workshop (May 14-18, 2018) to fantasize and produce visions of the future of the city of St Petersburg.
THE WHY FACTORY TU DELFT, RMIT MELBOURNE AND UTS SYDNEY PRESENT THE PLANET MAKER DESIGN STUDIO
TUD Actualities workshop ANCB Berlin. Within the workshop WeShare Berlin thirty students of The Why Factory collect and compare various ways in which habitable space in the city is being shared.
How do you imagine the future of city centre of Downtown Eindhoven?
OnTheGo asks the students to design a housing block capable of accommodating the different needs of each of its temporary residents and maximize the space to arrive to new levels of both compressionand expansion. We want to achieve this without sacrificing the specific requirements of its users, OnTheGo is a tailor made house on the move!
How would (y)our street look like in the future?
Can we imagine a city were Intensity, Biodiversity, Utility, Agility are so intertwined that the resulting organization is suggesting the idea of a cloud. A city were different pockets, densities, neighbourhoods, flows and climates can coexist in one homogenous experience? Can we imagine a tool able to generate such a composition? Can this tool help […]
What do 11 billion people need? What does one person need? During this workshop, we have analyses typologies, heights, floor area ratios, accessibility, energy, biodiversity, food, automation… We have measured and compared all that can be quantified. But we did not not avoid getting to the bottom of the matter, to the bottom of the […]
The Wegocity, Graduation studio is a follow-up on the Egocity studio (Fall 2014). Based on the hypothesis that the maximum density could be equal to the maximum of desires, the studio has been exploring the potentials of negotiation in dense context. Through the development of multi-user real-time video games, the studio explores participatory design processes […]
How much food and where it is produced come, for instance, to the equation, as well as the type of governance that better responds to current demands. What about animal species that were basically neglected from urban life for decades? How does energy consumption define what a city can be? As new concerns arise, designers […]
How good is it to stand still? Shouldn’t we go ahead? Is acceleration a tool for that? Can we test that? Can we make a world and a city that doesn’t stand still but goes fast? How to speed up? What technologies are there to do that? Can we really make a city that speeds […]
How can we make a city that is completely biodegradable? Where all materials, food, and energy resources reinforce each other? How can we fully integrate plant and animal life cycles into our living and building requirements? How can we imagine a city that is endlessly expiring, transforming, adapting?
(w)egocity aims to tackle frontally the dilemma of maximum desires / maximum density by accommodating truly the needs of users for a differentiated lifestyle, yet it does so following a restricted urban envelope that keeps energy consumption and footprint under control. The challenge of the studio is to come up with solutions that give priority to […]
Do we really need physical barriers to live together? Or can we imagine to live without walls? Can a community live in maximum collectiveness?
Tailor made housing over time
Based on the hypothesis of maximum density = maximum desires, the studio explores the potentials of negotiation and density. Through the development of multi-user real-time video games, the studio explores participatory design processes through gaming to model the competing desires and egos of each inhabitant in a housing block and designs their apartments accordingly in the fairest way possible.
Copy/Paste is an openly applied and premordial power in architecture of all time. Only recently – from the second half of the nineteenth century – Copy/Paste has become a secretive power, only openly revealed as’influence’. The twofold aim of studio Copy/Paste is to research the rules, methods and virtues of Copy/Paste in the history of architecture as well as to explore the potential of Copy/Paste as an open and progressive way of contemporary design.
The Willow House workshop is part of the 3D Nature project. It explores how to use an organic material – willows – to grow architecture.
How can HK’s housing escape its unrelenting uniformity, the absence of articulation, and the denial of diversity…? Why is it currently almost impossible to make something exciting? How to escape from the current laws? How to create more qualities? What qualities should that be? How can thus new housing towers appear?That changes Hongkong radically?
Can we imagine a city that is built with nature instead against it? Can we ‘help’ nature to become urban? And vice versa, our cities to become more natural? Can we create a 3D Nature beyond the green façade? Can we design buildings that produce nature?
This new studio is embedded in the previous research on the Transformer, but at the same time stands alone. We want produce a number of prototypes for the Transformer space. Partly physical, partly virtual. It results in a series of experimental installations. All installations use different materials and have different narratives, but all give answers to how the Transformer could be made, how you could interact with it and how it would feel to be in this ever changing space. In the installations, Transformer becomes tangible, touchable. In a way it becomes alive.
This workshop is part of the Transformer project and was done in collaboration with Marcel Bilow/Buckylab and Ulrich Knaack/Facade Research Group.
The Total Museum of Contemporary Art invited the Why Factory and MVRDV to exhibit the Vertical Village project in their premises in Seoul, Korea. We took this opportunity to extend the research. During a one-week workshop with the Yonsei University in Seoul, we tested the Village Maker, which was developed and presented in the first version of the Vertical Village book.
As the global population increases, our cities grow larger. This growth is accompanied by population and demographic changes, skyrocketing real-estate costs, sprawl, encroachment of green space, increased air and sound pollution, traffic standstills, and inadequate housing.
Are our cities as efficient as they could be? There exists inefficiencies in spatial usage and spatial qualities within the urban fabric from abandoned buildings and lots to buildings that are empty for more than 12 hours a day.
What if a city could adapt quickly to turn those inefficiencies into opportunities and find a new ideal state?
Resilient NL is a research by design studio by The Why Factory and the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment that tested unpredictable changes in different vectors of society and their effect on spatial planning. The studio envisioned new tools to address this situation. The changes that were explored are surprising and potentially have a radical impact on the spatial character of the Netherlands.
Within the series of projects on porosity T?F together with ABT initiated the studio on structure of porous building.
The studio aimed at methodical evaluation of the structural consequences of adding porosity.
Entitled ‘Porosity’, MVRDV and The Why Factory (T?F) present their ongoing research on the design of skyscrapers and the potential of porosity as a European approach to urban density. The results are presented as scale models made of LEGO bricks.
The minor Automotive Design is autonomous and provides a broad insight in Automotive Design and mobility. The minor is a valuable contribution to bachelor programs, and preparation for master programs, in mobility, Automotive Design and automotive engineering.
The basic premise of the Workshop is based on an intellectual challenge. How can we surpass our current behavior of claiming to be a unique genius, while forms and buildings show otherwise? Could we create an evolutionary tree, as Darwin, from which we can distill the different design- families?
Within a context of economic anxieties, environmental concerns on the future, demographic pressures and political unpredictability spatial planning increasingly find itself positioned in the role of speculating scenarios that would map the impacts of these unpredictable drivers in the future cities.
Ideal cities, utopias or human paradises have been imagined in detail by philosophers, poets, architects, social reformers, religious devotees, and artists for more than two thousand years. The attempt to invent the perfect city, cradle of the ideal society, is an abiding and ever-evolving vision embracing a wide variety of fascinating and often controversial movements and figures, including Plato, Filarete, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas More, Thomas Jefferson, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Charles Fourier, Etienne Cabet, Robert Owen, William Morris, Ebenezer Howard, Bruno Taut, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, the European Situationalists, the Japanese Metabolists, Archigram, Superstudio, and many more. But what can we learn from these intelligent inventions? What is that image or concept of Paradise and Utopia about? What city concepts and social structures do these utopias proclaim?
Armed with 200.000 bricks students from Aalto University built 100 towers in scale 1:500 investigating ways to Open the Tower.
As architects and planners we design for people. Human needs have always defined what we imagined, what we drew and what we built. Architecture and urbanism have simply been fulfilling a very old directive: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it…” That is what we did by building new cities, highways, harbors and bridges. Today climate change casts shadow of doubt on our civilization being so self centered. We are told that the world has been abused by us. By simply exploiting it, we seemingly missed the fact that there is more to it than just being our pantry… However, can ‘Green’ ideology, as we know it, embrace the whole complexity of that conflict? Can eco-city, as we know it (Masdar), be a sufficient solution? Biodivercity explores how both architectural and urban design could facilitate meaningful relationships between humans and other species.
Our current cities consist of towers and blocks that are somehow enclosed, distant, introvert and not mixed with urban life, social possibilities and ecological potentials. They are not open. How to open them?
This studio zooms into the architecture of a city that is built upon speed and direct accessibility. What kind of architecture can accommodate speed and performance of high speed vehicles? How is organization and apartment layout change according to the different vehicles used? What would a neighbourhood look like if the only means of transport would be a vehicle reaching 500 kmh/h?
This second studio of the Transformer project was taught at the ETH Zürich within the guest professorship of Winy Maas/The Why Factory at the department of architecture. The previous MSc studio had provided the general logics and implications as well as a first narrative of the life in the Transformer environment. This second studio elaborated on that base: the logics were further explored and made more precise. A series of transformations was imagined, described and then scripted in a virtual environment. And the results were again translated into a narrative, this time based on virtual models. Moreover, the studio added interaction to the Transformer project: Kinect motion tracking was used to simulate a number of transformations and how they can be activated by the user.
This workshop explores a specific part of Daliana Suryawinata’s ongoing PhD-by-design research ‘Austeria: A World Without Waste.’ The underlying hypothesis is that: it is possible to consume less, while maintaining a high standard of living. The workshop wanted to test how far could freedom and playfulness be present in such a city with strict consumption rules.
Cities are manifestations of multi-relational networks that perpetually become far more complex as we experience a shift from an industrial economy to one driven by the forces of (digital) information and services. Two of the most critical phenomena that incite the proliferating complexity of the contemporary urbanities can, on the one hand be identified in the rapid global urbanization processes and on the other, in the perpetual pervasiveness of information technologies within the urban environments.
Can we envision an environment, where urbanism becomes a collaborative platform?
How can a city sense the needs and desires of its users? This project is related to the robotic city research and the transformer project. It looks into the interface between a city and its inhabitants. If all parts of a city would be supplied with sensors, if the city would be able to see, hear, smell, observe it’s inhabitants at any moment – how could it react and engage?
This studio zooms into the architecture of a city that is built upon speed and direct accessibility. What kind of architecture can accommodate speed and performance of high speed vehicles? How is organization and apartment layout change according to the different vehicles used? What would a neighbourhood look like if the only means of transport would be a vehicle reaching 500 kmh/h?
We are encountering with increased frequency that architectural designs are being copied all over the world. Internet is partly responsible to the speed of ideas dissemination, but also it seems conceptual design lacks the specificity of a handcraft, copying is easy and cheap and fast. The context for many offices in crisis requires taking risks to survive. Yet competitions are investments with very low probabilities of success. So who can invest in originality anymore? Innovation requires patience, especially if you want to be original as well! Meanwhile clients demand faster and faster designs. Plans are seldom required; while a selling render is sufficient as long as it is exciting and provided in short notice. Cad becomes distant, photoshop reins.
This studio was part of the Q3 R&D studio of the Urbanism track. The general assignment of the studio and it’s location Harlemmermeer were extended with the brief to include food production into the urban planning strategy.
The objective of this workshop was to focus on scenario thinking and extrapolation of current trends. Focussing on food, four scenarios were imagined and explored by four groups of students. The outcome addressed a broad range of topics, including urban planning, society and economy. Scenarios were presented in a newspaper format based on the layout of The Guardian, including its sections Tech, Society Economy and Headlines.
Can we imagine a ‘family tree’ of architectural descendants? Can we, as true explorers or scientists, deliver the ‘Origin of the Species’?
This first-year postgraduate research studio investigates and designs the anarchistic city, a city without governance and collectivity, a city without rules. In this city, how is energy distributed? How are the roads made? Where are they if they exist? How about education? Sports? The studio will investigate the ultimate anarchistic situation and when and where it goes wrong. It is simulated as an interactive generative process on the base of abstract model city and applied on a real city that is growing in density in time. In order to investigate the relationship between density and anarchy, the studio will create a simulative game. – When do we need our neighbors?
The Food City Project explores the relation between food production and the city. The brief is very simple: Design a city for one million people, which is based on local food only.The project aims to reveal the implications, limitations, challenges and possibilities of local food production. Which techniques can be used, how much energy is really needed and how much land would it actually take? The Food City research project visualizes the spatial requirements of today’s food system and tries to find new architectural and urban typologies for integrated, transparent and sustainable food production.
This is the second part of our investigations on how animals and humans can learn to live next to each other in extraordinary new ways. As we all know the history of the city is a history of human conquest and domestication on natural ecosystems. It has been an anthropocentric driven development with a relentless threat to nature.
This studio imagines a city that is built upon speed and direct accessibility and supply. Can we develop a city that is entirely devoted to fast transit of people and goods? What systems and what architecture allow high-speed traveling and a smart circulation of goods? How can the positioning of program and its architecture contribute to direct accessibility or the desire for a minimum travel time? What can we say about safety issues? Is traveling with a speed of 400 km/h in a neighborhood safe? Can we make it safe? How can architecture anticipate in this?
EuroHigh as a theme was set up in order to bring forward the differences between the various cultures of the high-rise. It was organized as a semester-long master level design studio offered within the program of The Why Factory. One of its objectives was to introduce and utilize within the studio quick and creative ways of using LEGO bricks as a new modelling material. For that purpose 18 studio participants were granted 1 million LEGO bricks to their disposal during the design process. The studio is aided and enriched by the expertise of KRADS, a young architecture firm based in Denmark and Iceland, who have set up various workshops based on exploring fundamental architectural principles through LEGO bricks.
Accompanying Copy/Paste workshop at Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design Winy Maas gave a lecture on the latest projects of MVRDV and The Why Factory.
The workshop is a continuation of the previous Transformer studio, focussing on the urban scale. How would public activities, industries and landscapes change in a world that is made of the programmable, flexible material that the Transformer research is based on? A number of short animations illustrate how the Transformer City would work with regards to: public activities, such as shopping, sports, health care, agriculture, offices or transportation.
We are encountering with increased frequency that architectural designs are being copied all over the world. Internet is partly responsible to the speed of ideas dissemination, but also it seems conceptual design lacks the specificity of a handcraft, copying is easy and cheap and fast.
The workshop explored how the Art House Cinema can achieve a new function and integration in both urban public space and community space. The design workshop was an occasion for a discourse on the importance of the cinema in the neighbourhood. It prompted suggestions and developed strategies for the reactivation of this neglected cultural platform.
Anarchist leaders are an extinct species nowadays; their followers a minority regarded an obscure sect. After the Bolsheviques defeated the Russian Anarchists the anarchist wave returned with the Spanish Anarchist of the 30’s to be also defeated by Franco’s forces. The Americans resuscitated the movement in the 60’s founding alternative anarchist communities in the desert, but also that was short-lived. Recently only few attempts have been tried that are worth entering the history of anarchism.
The old Rome with its large storage of grain had only enough reserves for about three days. For today’s cities, this is even less. Cities have a symbiotic relationship with food. They are highly dependent on reliable supply, while what is left over after consumption forms a challenge for the cities’ infrastructure. If either fails, consequences can be lethal. Food means safety for the city.
This studio imagines a city that is built upon speed and direct accessibility and supply. Can we develop a city that is entirely devoted to fast transit of people and goods? What systems and what architecture allow high-speed traveling and a smart circulation of goods? How can the positioning of program and its architecture contribute to direct accessibility or the desire for a minimum travel time? What can we say about safety issues? Is traveling with a speed of 400 km/h in a neighborhood safe? Can we make it safe? How can architecture anticipate in this?
“In the face of modernity, the North is losing its remoteness. Global warming is opening up international trade routes, the unique yet changing ecosystem brings scientists, tourists and protectionists, and prospects of natural resources bring the excavators. As humans are showing they can even colonize the North, the world is losing an ‘out there,’ a part of nature that seems stronger than us.”
Next City – Excursions on Future and Living Lifestyles project offered two master classes as a part of a semester-long Next City program. Both were used as a think-tank environment aiming to identify main design themes for cross disciplinary and cross cultural collaboration within this project.
Superkampung is a vision in a form of design proposals for an even a more mixed, dynamic multi-class urban fabric in Jakarta. The research and design explored types of spaces which mediate different statuses and needs in Rawajati Kampung.
This is the first MSc studio, in which we explore the possibilities of a fully adaptable built environment. The studio combines logical and practical exploration and creates a speculative visual narrative, presented as an animated cartoon.
The early World Wonders have marked our past civilizations. From the Pyramid of Giza, the Collosseum, the Great Wall to the Eiffel Tower- they have been driven by politics, technology, philosophy, economy of their time. But how about the future production of World Wonders? How will our Zeitgeist be represented? What kind of upcoming wonders are able to embody our growing desires and ambitions?
This studio was initiated to foster international cooperation between China and The Netherlands. It brought together renowned research and design institutions in the fields of fashion, product design, graphic design and architecture in order to enable a cross-cultural exchange on different qualitative as well as quantitative approaches towards research and design methodologies. Participants of this anticipatory research engaged a discussion on the fate of our contemporary cities – their shortenings, fears, advantages, beauties and opportunities.
The Village Maker was a systematic attempt to explore abundant possibilities of exciting, vigorous, community-base urban villages that are structurally safe, economically feasible and sustainable. This Masterclass/ MSc2 Workshop was staged at the Berlage Institute Rotterdam between 3 and 12 June 2010.
It resulted in 36x 1:100 models and a study on the software ‘Village Maker’. Multiple experts and tutors worked together with the participants to set the parameters: from structure, climate, energy, access, collectivity, and costefficiency.
What if we had the chance to re-invent Cyprus? What dreams and what opportunities could appear for this island? What would future development of Cyprus be about?
The rediscovering of the city centres in the 1990’s is a combination of the search for alternative living environments, started from young and culturally interested low budget groups. Further pushed through the discussion about sustainability, doubting the efficiency of the sprawl. The attractiveness of the centre requires a transformation from a ‘museum city’ into a living city, meeting contemporary needs of living and working. Finding a stimulating fusion of the old and the new will be the task for the future.
How will we deal with in the future with the past that has yet to come? How will preservation change values? What will be the new monuments? We invite you to join us in an exploration of the future of our past.
Urban villages are a common typology in many Asian cities. The dense quarters in Shenzhen, the hutongs in Beijing or the kampungs in Jakarta all are part of this urban phenomenon. Where Asian cities grow and become more dense, the urban villages are under pressure. They are being demolished at an increasing pace. To replace them, large fields of repetitive, monotonous blocks are being built. The new blocks may answer the need of comfortable apartment space, but they lack the social coherence, spatial diversity and flexibility that the complex urban villages can provide.
Varosha! Design Studio addressed problems of urban planning of today’s Cyprus, where complex problems and a diversity of stakeholders have to be addressed. Approaching these issues required transparency and clarity that would allow public officials and community leaders to interact, address, and identify possibilities that exist and are affected by their decisions.
The project ‘The Accelerated City’ by Chris Cornelissen brings together different scales and argumentations of both urbanism and architecture.
This studio will explore the practices and technologies of the city from the perspective of the machine, bringing together designers, computer programmers and engineers to deeply address the roles for automatic technologies in the city space. The city will be seen as the ultimate machine.
Robots and other smart machines have the potential to dramatically change the human environment and world economy, especially when they are arriving in the job market in significant numbers. We are facing the robotic revolution.
The Clean Air City project looks into air pollution in cities and proposes strategies to improve urban air quality. The research part analyses the current urgencies and mechanisms of air pollution.
Today, sustainability in architecture and urbanism is mostly about energy efficiency.
The project is based on the well-known problems around today’s food production: food is produced far from where it is consumed, resulting in transportation, energy consumption and nutrient drainage.
If modern architecture meant the end of ornaments in the architectural scale, what is the urban implication of such postulate in the city scale?
In the fall of 2009 and spring of 2010 The Why Factory offered a platform for the Msc3/4 graduation projects called The Urgencies Platform.
Slumbooster is an attempt to upgrade slums while still making a profitable investment. This serves as an alternative to charity. In this MSc3/4 project, a proposal of how a garbage industry can coexist with the slum while creating interesting spin-offs.
Hong Kong PermaCity – Hong Kong Fantasies was a masterclass, organised as a joint studio in the framework of the International Forum on Urbanism (IFoU) by the Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, and the Berlage Institute Rotterdam in collaboration with the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University. The masterclass was carried out under the direction of prof. Winy Maas and coordinated by Tihamér Salij, Ulf Hackauf, Hendrik Tieben and Maurice Harteveld, in the period October 20 – 31, 2008 in Hong Kong.
If in the past holidays to far destinations were about ‘exoticness’, now this word has lost its meaning due to globalization, mass traveling and mass tourism. Maybe we are spoiled… Sameness of leisure patterns all over the world turn leisure into a global routine; there is no more ‘the other’ to escape from our daily life. That is the danger of getting claustrophobic at the scale of the globe. Leisure might kill us. As much as we need to re-invent ‘exoticness’ and ‘authenticity’, we have to speculate on new forms of leisure itself. After all, how leisure today could be meaningful and exciting at the same time? T?F invites you to research, theorize and design new leisure.
This studio will fantasise that Hong Kong—a city struggling to hold on to its reputation as a world financial centre, a global shopping Valhalla, and a liveable city with compelling architecture and magnificent nature—will make a comeback as an exemplary world-class city. What does it take, in our global economy, to be a world-class city?
The city accelerator is based on the global urgency of housing shortage.
Traditional apartments are often not used efficiently: Bedrooms are empty through daytime, living rooms are not used at night and bathrooms are mostly used for less than an hour per day.
The project focuses on tourism – its relation to economy and rapid expansion that can have adverse negative impacts. Leisure + attempts to turn the negative effects of the development of tourism into a new quality by creating an artificial sea in the Sahara Desert.
The project departs on a technological hypothesis: in the future, we will still drive in individual units, but we will not steer them anymore.
Robots and other smart machines have the potential to dramatically change the human environment and the shape of our cities. Technological innovation can further reduce the need for physical labor and create a richer, healthier and more comfortable life for many. It can enable us to populate cities more densely while providing more quality of living. But how exactly will we live, how will the city change and in which shape will robotics invade our lives?
To imagine the future has been regarded in the last decades as a safe step away from the complexity and urgency of our current issues. And yet, it is precisely here in the context of overwhelming realities that the future cannot be neglected anymore. The future as the present show us every day is full of unpredictability, it is full of news that hit the HEADLINES, events that from one day to the other redefine the entire face of a territory, a city, a country or a continent. How good are we able to react to these HEADLINES and to take the most advantage of unforeseen situations in The Netherlands for example? It is not only about following trends, it’s about evaluating new ones, its about reversing others, it’s not even related to trends perhaps.
How to design a new world wonder? With this question T?F started a one-semester design studio to challenge and provoke the wonder in contemporary (future) architecture. By contemplating the wonders of the ancient world, and analyzing the modern world wonders of the New7Wonders Organization, T?F established four elemental keywords from which the students explored the many dreams of architectural fantastications: Scale, technology, iconography and myth. These keywords served as design factors in order to challenge and constitute the wonder. By finding and constituting limitations in scale (e.g. volume & length), technology (e.g. tools & materials), iconography (e.g.representation & symbolic significance) and myth (human understanding, imagination and narrative).
In a semester-long MSc studio at Delft University of Technology, T?F looked beyond doom scenarios, guilt management and small scale approaches. Instead T?F explored the challenges of green architecture and urban design to harness its power.
There is confusion about what ‘green’ means for design. Ole Bauman, the director of the Netherlands architecture institute described the situation, “We are keen to participate, but we don’t know what it [sustainability] means.” Green projects are still disconnected efforts, which do not reach the scale of interventions needed. Green is fashionable, yet its design potentials are unexplored.