MVRDV

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! ❤️🩷🧡💛💚💙🩵💜🤎🖤🩶

📖🦆 Quack, quack, we're in this week's Donald Duck with the Depot and Markthal!

In a story taking place during Rotterdam's Summer Carnival, Donald and his friends rush around town in search of the lost crown of Parquita. The busy crowd at Markthal makes the chase difficult... but luckily the reflective surface of the Depot helps them spot the crown!

How cool to see our projects featured in one of Donald Duck's adventures. When buildings are recognisable enough to become part of a comic story, you know they have truly found a place in the city's identity and everyday culture. 🏙️

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen | Markthal | Rotterdam Make It Happen | Rotterdam Partners

Rotterdam ROCKS! We won the international design competition for the first Shift Embassy! 🪨🎉

Set to become a major cultural destination, it aims to inspire visitors to help realising large-scale ecological and societal change. 🖼️🌍 Our design sets out to act as a landscape along the Maas. It is a rocky green landmark – largely accessible to the public – where visitors move up and down along terraces, water, greenery, exhibitions, viewpoints, and gathering spots.

The building is an initiative of social enterprise Shift as a purpose-driven destination combining immersive art, architecture, community building, storytelling, and real-world examples of sustainable living and business practices. ♻️👥 Shift's goal is to move from individual to collective and ultimately systemic change.

The Shift Embassy aims to inspire visitors with a 5,000-square-metre immersive experience called the Elysium, with immersive art, inspiring stories and practical pathways for action. 🎭🏨 It will also feature a hotel with 200 rooms, education spaces, business events, local community gatherings, a food court, a restaurant and an observation deck.

The seven stacked rocks that make up the building are arranged around two key routes through the building's "caves": one for the exhibition and another for hospitality functions. A third exterior route twists up the sides of the rocks, leading to a publicly accessible viewing terrace, while the top of the building features a rooftop terrace for visitors to The Elysium. 🏙️👀

These terraces extend the riverside tidal park vertically, enveloping visitors in the nature that finds its home on the building's surfaces while offering spectacular views of Rotterdam. To enable this proliferation of nature on its surface, the skin of the building is covered with pockmarks and niches that provide space for soil, water, plants, and animals. 🐝🌸🌿🐦

The construction of the Shift Embassy will become a form of public experiment, an open documentation of which low-carbon construction strategies succeed and which do not, and which approaches succeed in minimising the ecological impact of construction – helping to advance sustainable building practices across the industry.

Rotterdam ROCKS! will be built as part of Rotterdam's Waterkant, a soon-to-be-realised new district on the South bank of the river Maas that will provide 3,750 new homes, schools, maker spaces, an urban sports campus, a new train station, offices, restaurants and cultural spaces.

🔗 Read more on the project here! https://mvrdv.com/news/4891/mvrdv-wins-international-architecture-competition-for-shift-embassy-in-rotterdam

Team: Arup, Arcadis, DGMR, SB&Co, Joris Laarman Lab

From moon gates to a colour-shifting textured façade. 🌙✨

This is our design for the flagship store of fashion brand Urban Revivo in the Sanlitun shopping district in Beijing, creating a retail space that combines the brand's forward-looking identity with references to the city's architectural heritage.

The façade is formed by suspended aluminium tiles and tubes, subtly branded with Urban Revivo's initials. Their dichroic finish creates an ever-changing appearance, shifting between shades of purple and blue as visitors move around it. 💜💙

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 here! https://www.mvrdv.com/news/4890/urban-revivo-flagship-store-sanlitun

The Strijp-S Tribune is climbing up! ⬆️

🏗️🚧 Construction has now reached the 4th floor, meaning the structure is halfway to being completed. As the building continues to rise, the stepped design becomes increasingly visible, and the building truly begins to live up to its name.

Developed for Trudo, this project adds 44 social housing apartments and 12 apartments for mid-sector rental next to the Ketelhuisplein in the lively Strijp-S neighbourhood of Eindhoven.

The building's apartments are combined with two floors of commercial space for retail, restaurants, or offices. Its stepped, tribune-like form creates a grandstand facing the Ketelhuisplein, mediating between the open square and the surrounding high-rises.

🌿🌤️ Large planted terraces will serve as both private and communal outdoor spaces, linked by staircases that connect residents across levels. From the lowest terrace, a pier extends toward the Leidingstraat, creating a new public lookout over the square.

Read more on the project here! https://www.mvrdv.com/projects/589/strijp-s-tribune

Contractor: Stam + De Koning Bouw bv
📸 Norbert van Onna

"It was meant to attract attention. Well, it certainly did."

After two decades, the Cancer Centre Amsterdam (CCA) is being dismantled and newspaper Het Parool wrote a piece on this temporary research facility and its initiator Bob Pinedo, Emeritus professor of oncology.

Our design for the CCA gave character to the simple, modular structure with striking colours of red and blue, which are used in anatomical drawings to represent arteries (red) and veins (blue). Each container was painted in a way that together they spell "CCA", advertising the existence of the institute.

As Jacob van Rijs says in the article, the design is an example of "architecture parlante". With a notable location next to the busy A10 highway, it became a symbol for the VUmc hospital. Always intended as a temporary structure, the building remained in use for 20 years, far beyond the five years originally planned.

Read the article here! https://www.parool.nl/ps/rood-blauwe-blokkendoos-van-cancer-center-amsterdam-langs-a10-wordt-afgebroken-het-moest-aandacht-creeren-nou-dat-is-gelukt~b98ebb45/

Find more information on the project on our website: https://www.mvrdv.com/projects/108/cancer-centre

We've won the SARA NY Design Awards (Awards of Honor) with the façade for the Tiffany & Co. store in Stuttgart!

💎 Inspired by Tiffany's history of material innovation, this design is a façade of 2,829 hand-crafted ceramic elements in the shape of diamonds. These are invisibly mounted on the glass storefront, giving them a "floating" and dreamlike effect.

Mounted on both the inside and outside of the glass façade using custom steel fixings, the density of these diamonds is adjusted to create transparency and opacity as required to allow views into and out of the store.

With an iridescent finish inspired by the Favrile Glass developed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, each diamond is cast by hand and glazed in nine different colours that make a gradient – from Tiffany's signature robin's-egg blue to a pristine white. This colour gradient captures the shopper’s attention while also allowing the store to blend into the neutral colours of the Dorotheen Quartier. The diamonds were manufactured by Koninklijke Tichelaar, the oldest ceramics manufacturer in the Netherlands.

Read more on the design and manufacturing here! https://www.mvrdv.com/projects/884/tiffany-facade-stuttgart

Organised by the Society of American Registered Architects | New York Council
📸 Gionata Xerra Studio

We have designed the renovation of the Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (GAM) in Turin! This project aims to restore the qualities of the existing building, while transforming it to be ready for the next century – with flexible exhibition spaces and publicly accessible art storage. 🏛️🖼️

The current building, dating from 1959, is still a remarkable exemplar of modern thinking. However, over the years the original clarity of the design has been lost, due to interventions to meet new safety requirements and museum standards.

Our design reverts many of these changes – reopening the skylights and discarding almost all of the internal partitions throughout the building, bringing back the original flexibility of the exhibition spaces. 🔄☀️ In the now-open-plan galleries, a grid of railings spans between columns, allowing display walls, dividing curtains, and other exhibition modules to be suspended from above – providing museum staff with a simple system to shape and reshape the layout of the galleries on demand.

The basement is converted into a true open storage, allowing the public to glimpse museum operations and see the full GAM collection. 🗄️🔍 Above, a broad diagonal pathway passes under the main gallery, creating a new public passage for Turin. Large areas of glass bring in natural light and frame views into the depot, while at night the storage below lights the route and museum with an ethereal glow.

🎨 Read more on the renovation here! https://mvrdv.com/news/4887/mvrdv-wins-competition-to-renovate-turins-civic-gallery-of-modern-and-contemporary-art-with-open-storage-and-adaptable-displays

Fondazione Torino Musei | Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo
Designed with co-architect Balance Architettura | EP&S Group | Stratosferica

A new urban gateway to the city! 🌆 This is Nangang Pair in Taipei – two complementary office towers with a "crumbling" surface and a contrasting façade that celebrate their apparent break.

The project serves as a formal entrance to the Nangang district, creating a public plaza by opening towards the Kunyang Station and guiding pedestrian movement towards the city.

🏢✂️🏢 The split between the towers creates balconies along the inner faces and matching cut-outs in the opposite volume. At ground level, carved corners form grotto-like overhangs above the lobby entrances.

This break is reinforced by contrasting facades: glass curtain walls with protruding mullions on the outer sides, and a finer, flush treatment within the opening. The facade grid continues into the plaza paving, where its warped lines emphasise the splitting gesture. 🧩

The ground floor includes generous lobbies, retail, cafes, and restaurants, while the third floor contains shared tenant amenities such as lounges and video conference rooms. Across the plaza, small pavilion-like kiosks and seating elements appear as fragments broken from the two towers.

✨ Read more here! https://mvrdv.com/news/4881/nangang-pair-mvrdv-designs-an-eastern-gateway-for-taipei

Client: 忠泰建設
Renders: MVRDV