Metacity/Datatown

by MVRDV

An attempt to understand the contemporary city at a moment when globalisation has exploded its scale beyond our grasp. Abandoning topography,ideology, representation, and context, the authors resort to pure data to discover what agenda for architecture and urbanism a numerical approach could provoke.

Genres: Architecture

224 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1999

About the author

MVRDV is a Rotterdam, Netherlands-based architecture and urban design practice founded in 1993, with additional offices in Berlin, New York, Paris, and Shanghai. It is currently regarded as one of the world's finest architecture firms. MVRDV is an acronym of the founding members' surnames: Winy Maas, Jacob Van Rijs, and Nathalie De Vries.

Reviews

[Mon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amazing presentation and MVRDV did a more than substantial work of researching catergorised living space and incorporating agricultural elements into it. However, I highly doubt anyone is going to take this seriously: it's an urban plan of blocks, equally spaced and shaped, with equal alignment of streets, typology and character. Ok, so you calculted the amount of area we need to live and produce food, the latter being 5 times the former. So what, we should become vegetarians? Cramming everything into one single vertical garden would produce unceasing nightmare - what if it burns down, becomes contaminated etc. The biggest problem with a regionalised plan (see Canberra) is its lack of flexibility - it doesn't allow for future invention and technology, or accommodate changes once we find fault with it.

Dear MVRDV - you surely do realise that if Datatown happens, we would all be out of a job?

[Heath · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm consistently fascinated by the work of MVRDV in the Netherlands. This book is a document of a video installation that represented urban population and resource-use data extremely effectively. It'll change how you look at city design, park land, and drinking water. And it'll help you picture what scarcity and abundance really mean. Combining video stills with text, the book does well to replicate the experience of the exhibit, but I can imagine that seeing it on the large screens had even more impact. A quick read given its visual nature, but heady. Awesome.

[Sudhir Bhatia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspiration for data visualization