In the fall of 2002, a young Dutch architect named Winy Maas came toYale to give a lecture on designing and building the 21st-century city,the challenges of which he illustrated by showing a 30-second videothat could have been shot above any American metropolitan airport: aview of the tops of several buildings and then, as the camera rose,more and more buildings, more roads and bridges and asphalt lots, untilan ugly concrete skin of low-rise development spread to all horizons.Maas was not the first architect to protest the unsightly sprawl thathumans have left over much of the earth’s surface, but he may have beenthe first to suggest that we preserve what’s left of our finiteplanetary space by creating “vertical suburbias” — stacking all thosequarter-acre plots into high-rise residential towers, each with its ownhanging, cantilevered yard. “Imagine: It’s Saturday afternoon, and allthe barbecues are running,” Maas said, unveiling his design for a15-story building decked out with leafy, gravity-defying platforms.“You can just reach out and give your upstairs neighbor a beer.” Heturned next to agriculture. Noting that the Dutch pork industryconsumes huge swaths of land — Holland has as many pigs as people —Maas proposed freeing up the countryside by erecting sustainable40-story tower blocks for the pigs. “Look — it’s a pork port,” he said,flashing images from PigCity, his plan for piling up the country’sporcine population and its slaughterhouses into sod-layered,manure-powered skyscrapers that would line the Dutch coast.Maas is the charismatic frontman for the Rotterdam-basedarchitecture, urban-planning and landscape-design firm known as MVRDV,which brims with schemes for generating space in our overcrowded world.With his messy, teen-idol hair and untucked shirt, Maas strolled thestage extolling the MVRDV credo — maximize urban density, constructartificial natures, let data-crunching computers do the design work —while various mind-bending simulations played across the screen:skyscrapers that tilted and “kissed” on the 30th floor; highways thatran through lobbies and converted into “urban beaches”;all the housing, retail and industry for a theoretical city of onemillion inhabitants digitally compressed into the space of athree-mile-high cube. The Netherlands, prosperous andprogressive, has long been one of the world’s leading exporters ofarchitectural talent. By the mid-1990’s, not only Rem Koolhaasand his Office for Metropolitan Architecture but also a whole newgeneration of designers — MVRDV, West 8, UNStudio — were trying toenlarge Le Corbusier’sdefinition of architecture as the “magnificent play of volumes broughttogether under light” and arguing for a process driven by research,information and a greater social and environmental awareness. Fightingtheir battles not just building to building but on a sweeping, citywidescale, Holland’s architects and designers were, in the words of theDutch culture minister, “heroes of a new age.”Still, paradigmstend to fall only under pressure, and at the start of the newmillennium an audience at the Yale School of Architecture could beforgiven for greeting vertical suburbs, pig cities and the rest ofMVRDV’s computer-generated showmanship with the same slack-jaweddisbelief that once greeted Fritz Lang’s“Metropolis” or the 1909 Life magazine cartoon that promised an urbanutopia of country villas perched atop Manhattan skyscrapers whiledouble-decker airplanes whizzed through their atria. When Maas came toNew Haven, MVRDV was barely 10 years old and had hardly built outsideits native Holland. And yet there he was with his straight-faced schemeto “extend the globe with a series of new moons” — send upfood-producing satellites that would orbit the earth three times a day.“Can you imagine,” he said with a boyish, science-fair enthusiasm thatindulged no irony, “if we grew our tomatoes 1
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