Brad Pitt doesn’t have a house in Amsterdam. A while ago the rumour was being spread that he and Angelina Jolie were going to buy one of those stately houses that line the canals of the Dutch capital. There were even pictures of them standing in an Amsterdam window, but that was a practical joke by the people from Amsterdam’s Madame Tussaud’s: they put the wax effigies of the couple there for a few hours.
But there is a house in New Orleans which is Brad Pitt’s. And being a concerned citizen with a healthy dose of social conscience he became the founder of Make It Right, a project to help rebuild New Orleans’s impoverished Lower Ninth Ward, one of the neighborhoods hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It involves building a number of affordable and environmentally sound houses over the next two years. To that end, Make It Right assembled a team of fourteen local, national and international world-renowned architecture firms specializing in innovative, ecologically responsible design.
Enter MVRDV, the Dutch architecture office that has been enormously successful at home and abroad with idiosyncratic and deceptively simple work that is full of original touches. There have been several articles about this work in the yearbook The Low Countries, and in one of the latest issues Hans Ibelings wrote about the basics of MVRDV’s method of operation: ‘”What if?” That is the crowbar with which the Rotterdam architectural bureau, mvrdv, prises open the real world; that, together with detailed calculation and measurement.’
Now…’What if?’ happens to be one of the basic priciples behind Make It Right as well. The new houses have to be constructed with a firm awareness of their natural surroundings. In other words: they have to be prepared for the worst, such as new levees caused by any future hurricane. And with New Orleans' water management still not quite up to standard, it seems like a good idea to call in the Dutch. After all they have kind of a history of drowning and still resurfacing stronger than ever.
Moreover MVRDV is quite handy at making natural limitations part of their ingenious designs. Acute shortage of space in the Netherlands? No problem for MVRDV: they just stack, like they did in their Dutch Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hanover. It was a tower of stacked landscapes, a Big Mac of Building that included a concrete dunescape, a greenhouse landscape, a forest, a ‘rain room’ where water was collected for the trees and greenhouse plants, topped by a roof area with windmills. And in designing their Pig City, the office worked out how the stacking principle might be applied to the entire Dutch pig sector and what architectural form it should have. Hence, according to the Make It Right website, MVRDV pursues a fascination for radical methodical research, both on density and on public realms. Through investigation and use of the complex amounts of data that accompany contemporary design processes, spaces are shaped methodically.
So the people from MVRDV, who already made a design for the yet to be built Martin Luther King School in New Orleans, drew a narrow long showbox-like house. They took their inspiration from the older Lower 9th Ward shotgun houses. Their Bendhouse (which will be built and finished in a couple of months) is a pile dwelling, with a twist between the front and back living quarters, both of which do not touch the soil. Other MVRDV designs for Make It Right include a floating residence and a house with an upward slant. All examples of clever building, which Winy Maas (the M in MVRDV) considers to be a silent protest against the current US administration. After all isn’t architecture a scheme for improving the organisation of the world that in broad lines already exists?
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