The Madrid headquarters of Cosentino City,
a reference point in the city for creative
people, is the venue for a conversation held
between Winy Maas, founding partner of
the Rotterdam-based firm MVRDV, and
Eduardo Arroyo, founder of the practice
NO.MAD. The two architects share thoughts
on the origins and transformation of their
respective design strategies, to then address
some of the questions that are bound to
mark the future of the discipline.
Eduardo Arroyo: I was thinking of the
strength of our memory. When you work,
when you conceive projects, sometimes
ideas arise that were hidden somewhere
from twenty-five, even thirty years ago, and
they come up as if for the very first time,
for new designs. Where do those thoughts
come from?
Winy Maas: Yeah. Well, I think there
are long-lasting, enduring obsessions or
agenda points that you would like to realize,
and then you store elements in your mind
and they’re always there, to resurface when
you need them. For example, I was always
fascinated by glass in general, and keep
finding different ways of working with it.
The more you use it, the more it becomes
part of your action points, and as you delve
deeper, people start to ask you about it.
Then your know-how does not only deepen
but also widens. You nurture it, and in some
way you become an expert.
EA: But it’s difficult to draw a line be-
tween your obsessions – which make sur-
prise appearances that can turn out to be
fruitful – and the pragmatism of copying
yourself. Where exactly lies the critical
boundary between these two things? Some-
times, when I resort to an idea from the
past, it’s hard to tell if I’m merely reusing
something or if I’m really evolving to a
deeper level.
WM: So what do you do? I think it’s
good to go through a subsequent evaluation
process. It’s through such an analysis that
you can truly determine whether the idea
deserves a new opportunity. For instance,
we are right now fascinated by the pixel,
and new ways of using it just keep cropping
up. We are currently studying methods of
prefabrication, or better, of de-assemblage;
that is, of dismantling what has already
been assembled. You can see it’s an idea
that is continuously reappearing in our
work, whether in our studio, The Why Fac-
tory, or in China’s prefabrication industry,
which allowed the rapid construction of
the Wuhan hospital in the early days of
the coronavirus pandemic. There, the pixel
helps, and it’s a whole new method that’s
used each time.
EA: The pixel has lost its abstract nature
and become something more realistic. Some
ideas that were utopian twenty or thirty
years ago eventually come back, turned into
something more functional. We call them by
the same names, but the words no longer
have the same power of meaning. Well,
they now have a different sort of power,
but they are not ideas anymore. They have
become systems.
WM: The ‘shock’ is now in speed, in size,
or in its recomposition. It’s different, but
“It’s difficult to draw a line
between your obsessions
and the pragmatism of
copying yourself”
