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Interview conducted by Luis Moreno Mansilla + Emilio Tuñon, originally published in El Croquis 86 MVRDV 1991 1997, recently digitized.
In Rotterdam, opposite the Kunsthal, our car is waved to one side at a police checkpoint. While an officer courteously asks us for our papers, we have time for a brief glance back at the building by Koolhaas, the architect who has managed to revive the history of the Dutch architectural avant-garde. (One never knows how fortuitous this type of event really is ...) After a quick, almost routine identification of the passengers and the vehicle, we set off for the port area where prominent tablet of glass and metal on the front line overlooking the canal houses a group of offices and architects' studios. On the third floor of this curious building from the 1960s is the "playground" of the firm MVRDV- a complex agglomeration of objects and people in constant movement. The three people who keep the office management going, Winy, Jacob and Nathalie, move about like electrons, giving instructions on one side and another (Everything has to be set in motion before starting the discussion!). For a few minutes while the machine is starting to warm up, we wait for the architects in a small 1 0m2 room which is full of so many things that one is incapable of recalling them clearly: aluminium screens alongside wooden frames, tables with differing aspects and qualities, a sample of increasingly varied chairs, rare objects that look like translucent minerals with opalescent colours, fragments and more fragments of "FARMAX", the book that the office is drafting at the moment, sales catalogues mixed up with publications by the firm, coffee and chocolate, plastic cups and spoons, letters, job applications and a multitude of faxes, bits of models in wood, resin, cardboard, cork...
While we take in the objects in this space one by one, the clouds are pushed by the wind across the horizon, a helicopter circles ceaselessly over the building and our eyes are led by the hypnotic, continuous flow of barges on the canal. From this small room, each instant, each glance, seems different to us. From this small room, in this agitated world where phenomena and multiplicities overlap in continuous movement, we perceive an air of optimism breathed in this office, perhaps the same one that is breathed in the city, the same one that is breathed in the nation...
Walking underneath the WoZoCo 's Apartments. the air we breathe is full of optimism. Is this impression real? What has happened in recent years in the Netherlands that has given young people such fast access to big projects? What has changed in the Dutch public service the nation's architecture?
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