Future Fest: Places For All With MVRDV's Fokke Moerel

All right, thank you Paul. Thank you very much for the invitation and thanks to all the voters for the popular choice award—that's amazing. When so many people like it, because that's what we try to do: not just places for all, but places for everybody. I'll talk about the Depot, the project that won the award, but also more broadly about how architects can help improve our living environment. I'm amazed by the global chat. I'll give a wide slider of projects all related to this title of 'Places for All'. There are three topics connected to our DNA: creating comfortable cities for people; smart use of resources and space for a future-proof environment; and how architecture can be a tool for inclusiveness. Let's start with a short introduction. Our slogan: we create social, innovative, realistic, green, remarkable architecture and interior design, urban planning, especially for a changing world. Our founders: Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, and Nathalie de Vries. This is our leadership in front of the Depot. I'm one of the partners; we now have over 300 people. They come from many countries, with headquarters in Rotterdam and satellites in Shanghai, Paris, Berlin, and now New York. We've been working in the US for a while—the Radio Tower in Manhattan opens today, and Mission Rock in San Francisco is under construction. Even working from home, we see the benefit of connecting globally. At our Rotterdam office, we have different spaces for different conversations. We don't specialize; we reinvent the wheel with every project. From the beginning, research projects like the Berlin Voies competition, almost 30 years ago, explored living in a dense yet individual world. How can we create comfortable, green, livable cities? For example, the Market Hall in Rotterdam is an extension of the streets, turning a vacant space into a publicly accessible food hall. A Valley has three residential towers with public green from bottom to top, making the city three-dimensional. In Pune, India, we added green and common spaces for 3,000 apartments. The Šiauliai Sky Garden in Singapore turned a highway into a pedestrian garden with water features. In Thailand, we carved out a public plaza with water for comfort. For future-proof environments, the Expo 2000 in Hanover was demountable and now being reused. In Shanghai, we reused bottles for a facade. In the Netherlands, Freeland is an urban design without a design—people collaborate on plots. We're also working on a former oil refinery in the city, turning it into a residential and leisure area while adding nature. Installations, like a temporary roof walk during a festival, show what's possible. Finally, art and architecture can be a tool for inclusivity. In Matsudai, Japan, we raised a community center to create covered public space. In Concordia, Poland, we opened up a commercial project to the park with a roof garden. In Mumbai, simple graphics and plants turned a shady space into a public gathering place. Now to the Depot, the project that won the award. Before, the collection was stored in depots outside the city, inaccessible to the public. Now, right in the city center next to the museum, we created a round volume to be less oppressive, squeezed at the bottom to maximize public space, with a panoramic roof. The mirroring facade makes the park feel twice as large. The interior atrium has a slit for people to walk from bottom to top, exploring art depots along the way. This creates a public experience: 95% of the building is accessible, from ground floor with trucks and lobby to the rooftop. It's your background exactly, so Paul is...

...at the right spot. Being invitative, that's but still at the same time it's not a museum. This is the back of house of the museum. This is the other side showing different types of exhibitions also, and with collaborations with different artists and designers, like here for the entrance. They didn't want to touch the building, just leaving the skin as pure as we made it. And here you can see the previous vendors going through, opening up the depots, looking through the glass, but also being able to enter the depots. And looking from up close, of course, that is the real brilliant series showing the back side, the back of house, how to restore and how to maintain, showing a little bit of how they restore, to celebrate that part as well. It's just as important as hanging pieces in the museum. Opening up to the city where we can, and also making super large spaces, the spaces that they did not have in the museum, to make these crazy big installations, and showing art from all sides, not just from the front in a white space, but really from the back, from the front, and you can look from the top and the bottom. And then on the sixth floor, we have the restaurants, even in the ceiling, reflecting the additional racer park on the roof. And this is indeed what it looks like today, although this is just before opening, of course. Adding trees which we were prepared already long before to have flat roots, creating a little bit of an oasis. And again, just like in Seoul, you can disappear in a green. This was with the opening. The objects or the architecture was almost an object of art itself. Quite scary to see these people dancing on your facade, but it didn't help. And these kind of pictures, I think, are very important to show not just the podium, but really that people are starting to inhabit and embrace the building as part of the city, and seeing it as a new scenery for the city. Pieces of art like here people have really made it complete as a piece of art, and also to show the public space is part of that. And that is what I wanted to share.

Yeah, well, if the client doesn't do so, then we will. Normally, of course, you get a brief and a budget and planning, etc., but we try to always read between the lines and to see what is missing or what is redundant, or where we can add a bit more unpredictable, but especially more public. So there were some, like I showed Concordia, which is important. The one with the rooftop—as I said, the rooftop was not in the program, and actually the client didn't think of it because it is in fact a commercial program, it's rentable space. It has a public or exhibition area, it has restaurants, but still the building itself is meant for commercial use. But throughout the discussions with the city—they were very much against because this building was vacant for a long time—and throughout the discussions with the city and the people making use of this island, we actually proposed, why not make the roof semi-publicly accessible so you can actually have the view, you can give it back. And in the end, that was indeed realized and therefore really embraced by the people there. So it was a mind changer. In other projects, it was already with the client they wanted to have this mix. For the Valley, maybe that was the project that was referred to—it needed to be a mix of program, but to make it actually publicly accessible and green all over, that really comes from our end because this is a neighborhood just outside of Amsterdam where it's only the financial district. There's nothing there, some football fields, etc., but hardly any residential. It's really starting to become more of a neighborhood, but it doesn't really have all these amenities in public spaces. So that was indeed our addition to make sure that the building, as a complex, is a neighborhood in itself. Sometimes it's a debate, sometimes it's just a nice discussion, and sometimes it's already in the brief.

Yeah, for sure. No, this has been a long, not just a debate, it's been research from different sites. We've tried many different things. For instance, there is indeed what is called bird safety glass, but the results are not that good and it's really expensive. At the same time, we could also imagine, like in airports, to have something to scare birds once a month or so, but we didn't go for that either. In the end, what reports showed us not from this building but in general is that the fact that it's really mirroring—so it's not just reflective, it's really mirroring—makes the birds actually fly away because they really see another bird coming towards them, so they fly away. That was very comforting for us. And of course we monitored afterwards, and actually on the other hand, at the museum or the museum park there, you have the control of OMA, but also the museum of natural history. The director there is keeping a small collection of dead animals in the city, and up to now he has one dead bird from the depot. So that comforted us that we looked into it. Yes, it's not an easy topic, but in the end we see that there's actually not that it's not really happening. So I think it's really more reflective buildings rather than mirroring buildings. But these numbers I could not represent.

Well, we try to do as much as we can, but per project, per client, that of course makes a huge difference what kind of projects. If it really is a residential development, for instance, or office space, then you can look in different fields, right? It's not going to be really publicly accessible most likely. Although for the silos in Amsterdam, a very old building that we did, it has a lot of neighborhoods for instance within what—so it's all social housing, or most of it is social housing. So the prices are quite low, the budget was a challenge, let's say. This is really 25 years ago, but still to add public or common space makes the building and project really rich. So on different levels, you can do it within the building for these people, for instance. Also for DNB in Oslo, a large bank—this is normally a topology of a building that is very closed and very introverted headquarters of the bank of a country. Of course, they don't want to show anything, especially the dealing room, which is normally enclosed. But there we introduced a walkway over the building and partly through. It's seven or eight floors tall, and a lot of people who work there actually use it so they can look into these normally completely enclosed environments. So even for people who work there, it can really be an added value. So it just depends on who your client is and what your agenda is, of course.

Nice question. Yeah, well, the whole structure, the same for the pink roof as I showed you, but also there was an orange one at the same time going into the city center. And a couple years ago, we had the big stair right next to the main train station going up to one of the monumental buildings. These installations are built out of scaffolding, so it's just rented. It's rented material and that's like 90% of all the material we use, so it's going to be reused and reused. The cladding on top—I have to think because there is wood and there is like a type of carpet, and the carpet is being reused I'm quite sure, but I couldn't really give you the exact details. But these are things that we do look at. Also for exhibitions—for instance, we had an exhibition right in the Nieuwe Instituut next to the depot, as you can see in this image, and that's where the pink roof was on top. We used a wood that they had in their workshops, we used the furniture that they had in their office space. So we're very—and of course there's always new material that you need to buy, and that can not really be reused or it's not really clear at that point what it's going to be used for afterwards, but it's definitely a hot topic for us to think about these kind of afterlives. It's definitely on our agenda and we try to do as much as we can there.

Yeah, sure. About the weight—very often, for instance, in transformations, you can find a point where you can actually have more load. Right on top of a column, you can most of the time easily add more weight right there, so you have to be careful about where you position your greenery. In case of the depot, it's new build, so it does have some impact on the structure, but basically you already have to deal with the water that it can capture, so the impact is not that big. It's not that you have to increase your structure by a large percentage; it's quite minor, I would say. What we did there, first of all—one of the reasons I didn't show it here, but one of the reasons the museum wanted to collect all parts of the collection in one building was not only to move it into the center and close to the museum, but also to keep it safe. So what you see here is a fridge, and it's safe at the same time. One thing they didn't want to have is water, so there's no sprinkler system at all. So all the water that you catch on the roof needed to be directed to the shafts and go through the shafts and up to any other space. Which also means that we actually made a computer floor, a raised floor above the structural floor. So basically you just make a regular roof on top of your structure, make a watertight roof, and normally that's where you stop or put your pedals. But then here, indeed, you have a raised floor where there's insulation as well if needed, and there is where we have about 80 centimeters of space for these roots. The bigger trees—they've been there for two years now and they do really great. It's been super hot, storms one after the other, so they're surviving really well, and the green is really blossoming. I'm happy to see that there are communities of birds on the roof. They were chosen two years before they would be placed on top of the roof to squeeze the roots in that sense and make sure they would grow horizontally instead of going deep. Of course, there's an irrigation system on top of the roof that maintains it, and they're being monitored by experts. We get a lot of inputs from consultants on this topic. They choose the type of tree together with us—not every type can survive with the wind at such high levels. There's a whole team around this. Especially for the depot, we see it survives really well. So the sandwich flooring is one thing, but the results at the end are definitely worth it.

Yeah, no, very true. Of course, it's a huge team. How long it's going to take I cannot tell you because we just started. We did more transformations of former industrial or harbor areas, but this might be more polluted. So that is a part that at this point I'm not deeply involved in this project, but I'm following it because it's indeed a very intriguing one to see how that can be realized, to live in that neighborhood, how much nature would be there, and how much control that would be. That is the slider we're looking at. Right now it's all tarmac—how can you put that further towards nature? Of course, we're going to draw a line like where is it going to be green and where do we need developments? Because the brief is basically a neighborhood, so it's residential and everything a neighborhood needs, so it's mixed in that sense. But there's still a lot of additional space that we can give back to nature simply by taking away the tarmac. That is what's covering the whole area. Identifying the remarkable spots and the reusable spots and buildings and structures in the area is one of the first things we're now working on. Then adding new program is the little catalog, the data that I showed, but nature always being a big part or equal part of that program, trying to always combine the two. You need a lot of specialists for that. The ground—I couldn't really speak to specifically for this project, but I'm sure there's a large team who is right on top of getting the pollution out before people move in. I'm sure that's going to take a bit of time, but it's fine. It's a master planning project and that always needs more time also to define the brief exactly: what type of housing, what type of amenities, what type of public space—that needs to be developed over time.

Well, keep on doing it. It's really nice to see that it's more interactive, so thank you for the invitation and have a lot of fun with the next speakers. Indeed, the High Line has been a very good example, it's beautiful. So enjoy the next lecture and thanks for all the comments, smileys, emojis, and questions. It was very nice. Thank you so much.