MVRDV is proud to announce that founding partner Winy Maas has been officially registered as a Landscape Architect in the Dutch Bureau Architectenregister. Winy completed his studies as a landscape designer in 1983 at RHSTL Boskoop. Shortly afterwards, he embarked on a brief 30-year diversion into architecture and urbanism, completing an architecture and urbanism degree at TU Delft in 1990, registering as an architect and urban planner on the Bureau Architectenregister in 1992, and founding MVRDV in 1993.

Though he has practiced as an architect for close to 30 years, Winy always brought the perspective of a landscape architect to the work of MVRDV. “Our work has always been fascinated by landscape – in both an environmental and a philosophical way”, says Winy. “Landscape architects are the design practitioners with the best overview of space and time. They are the masters of the panorama, working on all scales from XS to XL.”

The apotheosis of this thinking is in The Green Dip, the soon-to-be-published research from The Why Factory, Winy’s think tank at TU Delft. This research investigates the idea of a radical greening of our cities, envisaging a world in which our buildings might be entirely coated in an external layer of plants. In accepting his application to alter his registration, the committee of the Bureau Architectenregister expressed that it “appreciates the interdisciplinary way in which Mr. Maas practices his profession and looks forward to his future publications.”

Image: Barbra Verbij