MVRDV

Happy Moon Festival! 🌕
中秋快乐

The Urban Revivo flagship store in Beijing has been shortlisted in the Single-Brand Store category in this year's FRAME awards! 🤩

Located in the Sanlitun shopping district, the store's design reflects both the cosmopolitan outlook of fashion brand Urban Revivo and a connection to the local architectural character of China's capital.

The store's striking aesthetic begins with its façade. This is formed by suspended aluminium tiles and tubes, subtly branded with Urban Revivo's initials and finished in a "dichroic" coating that changes colour depending on the viewing angle, from purple to Urban Revivo's signature blue.

Throughout the store, familiar elements of Beijing's architecture are reinterpreted in a contemporary way. The entrance and display windows echo the form of traditional Chinese moon gates, while the grey brick interior recalls the city's historic hutongs.

Inside, the experience unfolds as a journey from traditional to contemporary. As visitors move upwards through the building, the characteristic archways evolve from the rounded moon gate to a modern inverted curve. Materials and accent colours follow the same progression, transitioning from lively, expressive interiors on the lower levels to darker, more refined spaces above.

Six immersive "Bold Rooms" showcase special collections, each with their own character. Highlights include the "playful room" with recycled fabric blocks and the "soft room", whose walls are entirely covered in cushions. ☁️

Read more about the nomination here: https://frameweb.com/project/ur-beijing-sanlitun-flagship-store-1
Learn more about the Urban Revivo Sanlitun Flagship Store here: https://www.mvrdv.com/projects/1245/urban-revivo-sanlitun-flagship-store

📸 Urban Revivo

📖👀 Looking for a good book? Condé Nast Traveler wrote about our Tianjin Binhai Library in their list of The World's Most Beautiful Libraries Worth Traveling For!

This futuristic library features a luminous spherical auditorium and floor-to-ceiling cascading bookcases. Located in Tianjin in China, it functions not only as an education centre but as a social space and connector from the park into the city's cultural district.

The Eye, a luminous sphere with an auditorium inside, takes centre stage in the atrium. The terraced bookshelves echo the form of the sphere and create an interior, topographical landscape whose contours reach out and wrap around the façade.

The five-level building contains a variety of educational facilities, accessed through the central atrium space. From the ground floor visitors can easily access reading areas for children and the elderly, the auditorium and the terraces which lead to the floors above. The first and second floors consist primarily of reading rooms, books, and lounge areas while the upper floors include meeting rooms, offices, computer and audio rooms, and two rooftop patios. 📚 💻 🎧

Read the article here! https://www.cntraveler.com/galleries/2014-09-02/10-of-the-worlds-most-beautiful-libraries
Find more info on the Tianjin Binhai Library here: https://www.mvrdv.com/projects/246/tianjin-binhai-library

📸 Ossip van Duivenbode

🏠⛰️ Nieuw Bergen has been nominated for the "Residential building of the Year" in the Architectenweb Awards!

This project contains five new buildings and two transformed historic structures, bringing 237 diverse homes to Eindhoven – from apartments for singles to family residences, and from social housing to penthouses.

The seven buildings gradually transition in scale and height, allowing the density to blend into its low-rise, historic context. A gradient of façade colours reinforces this transition, moving from the dark red brick of the existing buildings through brown, beige, and light grey to the white stone façade of the 17-storey tower. 🧱🟫⬜

The jagged sloping roofs create a dramatic, mountainous silhouette while following a 45-degree angle from neighbouring structures to maximise daylight. ☀️📐 Covered with greenery and photovoltaic panels, three roof peaks feature open terraces with communal spaces and a greenhouse for gardening. Ground-floor retail spaces benefit from sunny, largely car-free public areas with room for terraces. 🌿🛍️🍽️

Read more on Nieuw Bergen here! https://mvrdv.com/projects/290/nieuw-bergen

SDK Vastgoed B.V. | Stam + De Koning Bouw bv
📸 Ossip van Duivenbode

A new cultural and creative neighborhood in Potsdam – the Kreativ Quartier has been completed!

Our masterplan set out to restore the historic urban block while introducing a very different kind of inner world: a dense and vibrant "Village" for the city's creative community. 🎨🏛️

Rather than leaving the centre of the block as an open square, the plan proposed a collection of smaller buildings, alleys, courtyards, and squares. This created space for a diverse mix of uses and considerably more affordable space for artists and small-scale creative businesses than originally required in the brief.

Across the quarter, 25,000 square metres of floor space accommodate creative and cultural uses alongside shops and event spaces, with existing historic structures integrated into the ensemble.

The ideas behind the masterplan have now taken physical form. Following our design for developer Glockenweiß, the individual buildings and their ex*****on were developed further by the project's subsequent architects, designers, and construction teams.

👥🤝 What began as a participatory process involving the city, developers, architects, and future users has become a new piece of Potsdam: a place that combines the intimacy of a village with the energy of a creative quarter.

The Kreativ Quartier opens on September 4. Read more on our masterplan here! https://www.mvrdv.com/projects/419/potsdam-kreativ-quartier%C2%B3

Wowza! This is WOMA – a new hub for fashion, art, and creativity in Wynwood Norte, Miami. 👗🎨 163 homes, alongside offices, retail, and atelier spaces create a porous stack of small blocks wrapped with colourful, textile-inspired façades.

Developed by Uribe Schwarzkopf, our design stands out but also builds upon the character of the neighbourhood with its garment manufacturing history and recent reputation as a cradle for artists.

The stacked blocks maintain the human scale, with broad staircases ascending towards a raised public plaza that is cultural heart of the building – with flexible space for fashion shows, exhibitions, and community events. Fronting the plaza, there are four atelier-apartments for artists to live, work, and showcase their work to the public.

🏘️ WOMA was designed for a diverse community – with apartments ranging from studios to 3-bedroom apartments, offices, a co-working business centre, and retail units. There is a rooftop landscape featuring amenities such as a swimming pool, sports terrace, and a pet park.

The blocks of the project are given distinct façades, with patterns inspired by woven textiles. 🧵🌈 The variety of colours emphasise the creative energy that underpins the project and recall the colourful street art of Wynwood.

The first creative resident will be Bolivian-born fashion designer, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Rosita Hurtado, who owns the WOMA plot. She will have her new headquarters here, with her street-level commercial space marked with a special façade inspired by her work.

An energetic mix of living, creating, and exhibiting that will become a new destination for culture in Wynwood Norte, read more on WOMA here! https://mvrdv.com/news/4896/mvrdv-mixed-use-woma-wynwood-norte-miami

Architect of record: Kobi Karp Architecture & Interior Design
📷 MVRDV

Construction update from Chengdu – where the LuLa Light Mall has topped out! 🏗️ 🚧

This future open-air, porous shopping centre takes the shape of a loose stack of boxes with openings between them. This results in large terraces, walkways, and staircases to enjoy the local climate and views of the neighbouring lake – allowing visitors to blend shopping with nature. 🛍️🌿

The project comprises two main elements: a 19-storey tower and a four-storey plinth. The tower keeps in line with the adjacent high-rises of the city, while large deviations are found on its lower levels, so that the tower blends with the more loosely arranged boxes of the plinth.

The commercial spaces will accommodate a big variety of different commercial activities: shops, restaurants, cafés, bars, spas, salons, and gyms can all find a comfortable home alongside nature.

Read more on the project here! https://www.mvrdv.com/projects/661/lula-light-mall

The Vertical Village… revisited! 🏘️ 👀 Construction has started on the Bihailou Art Village, a mixed-use cultural and commercial centre in Shatoujiao, near the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border.

The design comprises a multicoloured stack of irregular “houses”, a concept based on The Why Factory and MVRDV’s original concept for the Vertical Village that was first developed in 2011.

In the case of the Art Village, this approach allows every part of the programme – the 🎭 multifunctional theatre, 🎏 Fish Lantern Museum, and the building’s 🛍️ shops and 🍴 restaurants – to occupy a space perfectly suited to their requirements.

With each “house” having an individual entrance, it also allows the different functions to set their opening hours independently of each other. This leaves the circulation weaving up through the heart of the stack as a permanently accessible part of the public space.

Visitors will be able to able to climb this network of stairs, escalators, ramps, and gangways at any time of day, glimpsing the surroundings through gaps between the boxes, until they reach one of the project’s many roof terraces for views of the mountains, the cityscape, and the bay. 🏞️🌆🌅

“Fifteen years after the Vertical Village book, this project manifests the call to humanise the city, in contrast to the scale of the monolithic tower developments all over the world, especially in Shenzhen”, says our founding partner Winy Maas. “It combines density with humanity – what if we could make all our cities like this?”

Read more about the design here! https://www.mvrdv.com/projects/961/bihailou-art-village

Construction image © Ruihua Architecture Design Institute

Looking for a carbon-conscious outing in Toronto during your summer break? Our exhibition Carbon Confessions is still on display for a few more weeks – until 22 August – at the Urbanspace Gallery!

In this exhibition, we show our quest for carbon reduction with more than three decades' worth of projects. Our ideas, ideals, and everyday actions, but also the missteps and missed opportunities. 🏙️♻️

📖 There’s our "Carbon Storyline", a series of transformation projects and 18 anecdotes on our attempts to reduce carbon. We also display six "Carbon Cases" in which the embodied carbon emissions of our projects are calculated with our openly available CarbonSpace tool.

Read more here! 👉 https://mvrdv.com/news/4864/carbon-confessions-opens-in-toronto

📸 Cheryl Rondeau
Toronto Society of Architects - TSA

Happy WorldPride Amsterdam! ❤️🩷🧡💛💚💙🩵💜🤎🖤🩶