(NL)	MVRDV is the abbreviation of the names of its three founders, Winy Maas, Jacob Van Rijs and Nathalie De Vries, who have been associated and based in Rotterdam since 1991. Their activities lie at the confluence of several disciplines--architecture, city planning and design--and pay no heed to the boundaries of the various areas of activity. What typifies their approach is probably the pragmatism which they display, combined with a manipulation of programme parameters, pushed to the limit. They emphasize a determination to take on the programmes and the at times conflicting viewpoints of the parties in question--commissioning bodies, users, spectators--and they turn these tensions into the actual matter of their architecture. Far from culminating in a synthesis, their architecture appears rather as an experiment with extremes. Their housing project called 3D-Tuin, Hengelo, tallies with their frequently mentioned concern to do with increasing density in order to preserve "natural" areas as opposed to total and continuous urbanization. They usher in the idea that nature is not necessarily rooted to the ground, and they have come up with a building in which each apartment has a balcony which may be up to 10 metres deep, planted with trees, like a garden; taken together, these balconies turn the tower block into a veritable layered forest. It represents nothing less than a challenge to gravity, which makes it possible to restrict the land use, while at the same time offering everyone a chance to create their own secret garden.
MVRDV Maas (Winy) (1959), Van Rijs (Jacob) (1964), De Vries (Nathalie) (1965)
• 3D-Tuin, Hengelo en cours