As ambassador for GEVEL2020, the Dutch Facade Fair, MVRDV’s Gijs Rikken has helped direct the program of the first day of the event, on Tuesday 28 January 2020, and will give the headline lecture of the day. Gijs, an architect and Associate Design Director at MVRDV, leads the MVRDV Materials Group, which initiates and carries out the materials research within the firm. For GEVEL, the Materials Group has indicated various research directions: in lectures and with pavilions, the architects will show their ideas for the façade – and the building industry – of the future.

“We collect today's ideas and dreams and translate them into concepts,” says Gijs. “From this, new visions of the future will emerge. We also want to investigate the manufacturability of our ideas, together with partners from the construction industry.”

On Tuesday from 11–12h, Gijs will give a lecture on Future Façades. From 13–14h it’s the turn of MVRDV BIM Specialist María López Calleja, who will talk about Datascapes and BIM, explaining how MVRDV uses BIM as a design tool and how it enables designers to simulate and manage the spatial consequences of the desires of the various parties involved in a design process.

Besides MVRDV’s activities on the first day of the fair, the ambassador of day three of GEVEL2020 on Thursday 30 January, architectural firm heren5, has organized several lectures about The City of Tomorrow and The Art of Architecture. The final session is co-created alongside MVRDV, in which the architects will create the residential building of tomorrow based on the wishes and preferences of the people in the auditorium by means of “live scripting” – offering an outlook on what data-driven building technologies can achieve.

Image: Hufton & Crow