This essay by MVRDV editor Rory Stott was originally published as "Architecture for Transparency" by About:, a new magazine and multimedia platform published by Hearst Italia. Launched at the opening of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, About: is composed of a twice-yearly bookazine, a website, social channels, an events programme, and an educational "SuperAcademy" – embracing the logic of the network to become the point of reference for the community interested in the culture and practice of architectural design.

If you ask immigrants to the Netherlands about the cultural quirks they find most confusing, you’ll soon strike upon the topic of curtains – or rather, the lack of them. In cities where it is common for living rooms to look directly onto the street, without front gardens or other buffer zones, Dutch households often do not install curtains, or rarely close the ones they do have, giving passers-by a clear view of their private space. The explanation usually given for this behaviour invokes the country’s Calvinist history: guided by their religion, the Dutch people developed a culture of frugality, diligence, and discipline, a culture in which using curtains was seen as a sign that someone had something to hide. Today, while Calvinism (along with religious belief of any kind) has declined dramatically in the Netherlands, the culture it created persists.

Portlantis. Image © Ossip van Duivenbode

Perhaps it is this same culture of transparency and communal surveillance that underpins the Dutch tradition of visitor centres – a tradition highlighted by MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas during the recent opening of Portlantis, a visitor and exhibition centre for the Port of Rotterdam. Located by the beaches of the Maasvlakte 2, the port’s second artificial expansion into the North Sea, Portlantis combines a café and restaurant with a three-storey permanent exhibition about the port’s role in society – explaining the past, present, and perhaps most importantly, the future of this crucial pillar of society. While visitors learn about these topics in the building itself, supersized windows on each level allow them to watch the hustle and bustle of the port in action.

Portlantis is just one in a series of recent projects by MVRDV that, while superficially very different, share one thing in common: they are all designed to give people a glimpse behind the scenes of the type of major institution that the general public might find, to varying degrees, opaque and mysterious.

Depot Boijmans van Beuningen. Image © Ossip van Duivenbode

The first, and most high-profile, of these projects was the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen. Opened in 2021, the depot is an art storage facility for the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen that invites the public inside. Visitors view the stored art through windows in the building’s atrium, can take tours into the storage rooms, and can watch critical museological processes such as conservation, restoration, and the preparation of artworks for transport.

Over nine thousand kilometres away, currently under construction in an industrial park on the coast of Taiwan, is Sun Rock, a warehouse and maintenance workshop for Taiwan’s government-owned power company Taipower. It may seem almost sacrilegious to compare this industrial warehouse to a building dedicated to art and culture such as the depot, yet at their most basic level, both are fundamentally working buildings for maintenance and storage. And, like the depot, Sun Rock is also designed to invite the public inside, providing them with a way to watch the processes that take place in the building and learn more about the organisation that occupies it.

Sun Rock. Image © MVRDV

Why would three such radically different institutions – a museum and a port in Rotterdam, and an energy company in Taiwan – all be pursuing the same unconventional relationship with the public? The answer might lie in our current cultural era, in which a climate of online misinformation and increasingly populist, ‘post-truth’ politics has reduced people’s trust in the institutions that organise our daily lives. Although this shift is most apparent in the USA, where Gallup polling has measured the public’s confidence in institutions as “historically low” over recent years, it is also a trend that holds true in countries around the world.

In this climate of populism and distrust, institutions need to make an extra effort to explain themselves – why they exist, what they are working towards, and how they are using the resources available to them. For both Portlantis and Sun Rock, one of the primary drivers for creating their public buildings was the climate crisis, with both of their respective institutions aiming in large part to communicate the steps they are taking towards carbon-neutral operations. In the case of the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, while it was still under construction in 2019, architecture critic Domeniek Ruyters summarised the impulse to create a publicly accessible storage facility:

“In a time when museums are all too often rushed by a crazed entertainment industry, the scientific tasks must be defended with some emphasis, so that politicians and private collectors do not start thinking that a museum can also be a museum without the money-guzzling collection that is not visible anyway. Making the Boijmans depot public is therefore not only a radical choice but also a political choice, which could well become dominant in the current museum discussion.”

While all three institutions may have had similar reasons for wanting these facilities, the unique conditions of each project enabled MVRDV to elaborate a different typology for each project:

The atrium of the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen is the building's central hub, with artworks on all sides. Image © Ossip van Duivenbode

The Panopticon

With its bowl-like shape, mirrored façade that reflects the surrounding park and skyline, and its rooftop green space, the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen makes a number of significant overtures towards its environment in Rotterdam’s Museumpark. Yet it is, at the most basic level, essentially a concrete bunker, a reality necessitated by a combination of security concerns and stringent climate control requirements.

In order to make a building that is simultaneously open and closed, MVRDV gave the depot a notable inward focus. Only once a visitor arrives into the atrium that forms the heart of the building are they immersed in the museum’s collection. Viewing windows into the storage compartments are found on every level, while large glass display cases designed by Marieke van Diemen enable visitors to view artworks not only on all sides, but above their heads and below their feet as well.

The dramatic transparency of the atrium allows artworks to pile up in layers. The atrium becomes the central hub from which the visitor can gain an overview of the entire collection, inside the building’s impenetrable outer shell – similar in spatial arrangement to Jeremy Bentham’s famous panopticon model for a prison (albeit in this case focused on human expression rather than human oppression).

Portlantis' large viewing windows serve to focus visitors' attention on specific parts of the port. Image © Ossip van Duivenbode

The Watchtower

Portlantis operates on a very similar principle to the depot, creating a central position from which the viewer can see in many directions. But here there is one crucial, obvious difference: where the content to be seen in the depot is contained within the building’s shell, an important part of the experience at Portlantis is to see outward to the expansive surroundings of the port itself.

This concept of a central hub becomes geometrically literal here: the five floors are square, with a circular atrium running through their centre. Each floor is rotated relative to the next, as if the atrium were an axis they could spin around. The rotation of the floors means that each level is turned to face a different location in the port; combined with the windows that adorn one full wall of each level, this allows the port to become a part of the exhibition’s content – the building focuses the visitor’s attention on an area that is relevant to the content being explained.

The rotation of the floors also creates landings for the crimson red staircases that wind their way up to the roof, creating a free public route that further solidifies Portlantis as a form of viewing tower, a platform from which people can watch the port operating around them.

Sun Rock's solar panel façade clearly communicates the sustainable ambitions of the building's owner. Image © MVRDV 

The Duck

Spatially, Sun Rock is organised in much the same way as the depot: an atrium in the heart of the building serves as a “data room” where visitors can see real-time displays that offer insight into Taipower’s operations, while viewing platforms allow visitors to watch the energy company at work. Like at the depot, the external shell is largely closed.

However, this project has a twist that dramatically transforms how it functions as a communication device. The building’s outer skin is plastered with solar panels that are layered almost like scales, while the building’s shape – something like a cross between a bicycle helmet and a shoe – is parametrically shaped for an optimal compromise between the goal to convert as much sunlight into electricity as possible and the project’s programmatic requirements.

This façade will not only generate more energy than the building requires to operate, it will also function as a sign – in the classic Venturi-Scott-Brownian formula, the building is a quintessential duck. This solar panel armadillo is not only unmistakeably the property of an energy company, it is also unmistakeably the property of an energy company with sustainable ambitions. Sun Rock is a clear example of one of Winy Maas’ guiding principles, hyperbole: designs that push a single principle to the level of excess in an attempt to recalibrate people’s expectations for what an ‘average’ building could achieve – a kind of manipulation of the architectural Overton window.

If these “buildings that show how the world works” are to become an integral part of a more transparent (and hopefully more trusting, less divided) future, these three examples will only scratch the surface of what is possible, as architecture reacts to a great variety of different institutions, forms of informational content, and other specificities. As Winy Maas reflected on the creation of the depot in The Routledge Handbook of Urban Cultural Planning:

“I think there are more typologies in this space, and if more institutions want to make their own open storage, it should be an opportunity to try something new, to see more concepts come up. From hyper-neutral, to super-scientific, to completely random, to extremely eclectic. There are endless ways we could do it – let us test them all, in every city another way.”