Growing urban populations pose all manner of challenges, one of which is how designers can come up with more efficient ways to cram people in. The new Wego installation on show at Dutch Design Week takes this to the extreme, aiming to provoke ideas around how competing interests can exist in harmony within shared tiny living quarters.
Dutch architecture firm MVRDV is no stranger to thinking outside the box, with twisting towers, all-glass office buildings and curvy solar-powered luxury homes making up its portfolio. Its latest concept, dreamt up in its Why Factory think tank, doesn't concern itself with practicality in any way, however, and is meant purely as a thought experiment in tiny living.
The nine colorful blocks that make up the nine-meter-tall (30 ft) Wego installation are stacked together in a Tetris meets Snakes and Ladders kinda way. There is a big emphasis on vertical spaces with a hammock suspended several meters off the ground, wedged in hot pink office spaces and what appear to be drawers of some kind, for some reason.
"Based on the hypothesis that the maximum density could be equal to the maximum of desires, this research conducted by the Why Factory explores the potentials of negotiation in dense context," says professor Winy Maas, who heads up The Why Factory. "Through gaming and other tools, Wego explores participatory design processes to model the competing desires and egos of each resident in the fairest possible way."
Whatever that means, we're finding it hard to get swept away by all this without actually visiting the installation. It does, however, certainly make for an impressive spectacle. Dutch Design Week runs from October 21 to 29.
Source: MVRDV