The Jeffrey Fine (C'76, MArch'78) and Andrea Katz Lecture: Winy Maas of MVRDV
The Department of Architecture welcomes, architect and founding partner of MVRDV, Winy Maas, for his lecture, The Future City: What's Next? The call for sustainability has never been louder. When we talk about cities of the future, we often think of them as sustainable and smart but according to Winy Maas, they are much more than that. "I advocate for denser, greener and more attractive and livable cities, with an approach to design that centers around user-defined, innovative, and sustainable ideas for the built environment, regardless of typology or scale."
The 'M' of MVRDV, Founding Partner and Principal Architect Winy Maas (Schijndel, NL - 1959) has received international acclaim for his broad range of urban planning and building projects, across all typologies and scales. These are often self-generated, innovative, experimental, and theoretical.
Driven by this dedication to green, user-defined, sustainable cities and spaces, Maas' leadership drives many of the office's award-winning projects, amongst them Rotterdam's Markthal (2014), Crystal Houses (2016), the Tianjin Binhai Library (2017), Valley (2022) the first publicly accessible art depot in the world, Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, which opened its doors in Rotterdam at the end of 2021. In Maas' broad portfolio are several masterplans, including a vision for the future of Greater Paris, the Left Bank in Bordeaux, and the waterfront in Oslo. Maas supervised the world horticultural exhibition Floriade 2022 and Eindhoven city center from 2017 until 2022.
Maas challenges colleagues, clients, as well as students and collaborators at TU Delft's The Why Factory - an internationally engaged think tank Maas established in 2008 - to challenge the boundaries of established standards to produce solutions that reimagine how we live, work, and play. Aside from his dedicated leadership role at MVRDV and professorship at TU Delft and elsewhere, Maas is widely published, actively engaged in the advancement in the design profession, and sits on numerous boards and juries, including the Spatial Quality Boards of Rotterdam, Eindhoven, and Barcelona.