A futuristic hotel made of colorful, movable rooms appeared in Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week 2017. The Rotterdam architecture studio MVRDV created it, and it asks a simple question: how do strangers share a crowded city?
MVRDV calls the installation (W)ego. It stacks nine rooms into one structure, and each room has its own color, layout and personality. Because the rooms can shift, the whole building can take many shapes.
Nine rooms, nine personalities
Color does most of the storytelling here. A purple room lines its walls with shelves, while an acid-green room offers ladders and hammocks. A hot-pink suite climbs through several levels, and a bright yellow attic completes the stack. Together, the rooms read like a lineup of very different tenants under one roof.
Why a futuristic hotel about density?
MVRDV developed (W)ego with The Why Factory, its in-house research lab. The lab studies how cities may grow as resources shrink, the climate shifts and populations rise. Dense housing puts people with competing wishes in close contact, so the team treats design as a negotiation.
In this hotel, guests must deal with the dream spaces of their neighbors. Winy Maas, MVRDV co-founder and one of three Dutch Design Week ambassadors, framed the idea around that negotiation. The studio also tests participatory methods, including games, to weigh each resident’s wishes and ego fairly.
In that sense, the project treats housing as an ongoing conversation instead of a fixed floor plan.
About MVRDV and Dutch Design Week
Maas leads MVRDV with Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries. Recent projects from the studio include a plant-covered walkway in Seoul and a tower block shaped like a giant staircase.
MVRDV placed (W)ego on Markt Square, where it stayed on show from 21 to 29 October 2017. It was one of four MVRDV projects at the event. Another was a book that encourages architects to borrow ideas from each other.
(W)ego also builds on earlier Why Factory research, especially the Vertical Village. One detail stands out, however. The team did not plan to reconfigure the installation during the week. Still, because it is double-sided, visitors could see two different arrangements in a single walk-around.
For anyone interested in adaptable housing, (W)ego works as both a thought experiment and a piece of bold architecture. It suggests that future cities may need buildings that change as their residents do. For more projects like this, browse our architecture and design stories.
Finally, photography is by Ossip van Duivenbode.
Source: DEZEEN
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