The Next Hutong research is on display at the Nurturing House, as part of Beijing Design Week, while MVRDV’s installation The Collective Hutong is on display as part of the Dashilar Pilot projects. MVRDV’s The Next Hutong is a conceptual proposal for the future development of the Xianyukou hutong in central Beijing. It creates a better model for the future by envisioning a sustainable economy housed within the existing urban structure, with key architectural interventions designed by MVRDV. The Collective Hutong is an installation which creates a rare, indoor community space in the Dashilar hutong filled with MVRDV’s playful Vertical Village furniture collection. Both are on display from September 23rd to October 7th as part of Beijing Design Week 2015. MVRDV’s two exhibitions mark the fifth consecutive year of The Netherlands’ participation in Beijing Design Week. “In this urban age, how can we be healthy and happy in our cities? And how should we nurture our cities, with clean air, water, energy, and food, so that they in turn nurture our lives?” So asks the brief of Next City Living Lab’s Nurturing House, an exhibition of projects intended to improve the quality of living in China by bringing Dutch and Chinese expertise together to explore solutions for a better future. The Dutch ambassador, Mr. Aart Jacobi, expressed: “I have seen that much can be gained from matching Chinese and Dutch expertise in collaborative creative partnerships jointly working towards improving the quality of life in our cities for the long-term. It’s wonderful to see so many of our country’s key innovators taking part in the Next City Living Lab. This shows that China is an important partner for the Netherlands, also in the creative industries.” The Next Hutong explores the development of the Xianyukou hutong, which has been delayed in comparison to other surrounding areas, which creates an enormous potential for the area. Several spatial tests have been imagined, each exploring a specific potential with an individual, extreme hypotheses so as to create a hutong that is at once monumental, dense, green, mixed and individual. The project is exhibited as a film and a large format book as part of The Nurturing House by Next City Living Lab. The exhibition embodies innovation and creativity for a better urban future, while also demonstrating the spirit and strengths of Dutch design: pragmatic, open-minded, conceptual and adhering to the principle ‘less is more’. The Collective Hutong develops MVRDV’s ideas about spatial interventions in Beijing’s Hutongs by creating a truly public space in which the diverse ‘Vertical Village Collection’ of furniture is displayed. Residents of the hutong can interact with the furniture as a sculpture, or use it as a pleasant community meeting space. The Dashilar Pilot Projects have since 2013 been incrementally upgrading the ancient hutong of Dashilar. It creates a laboratory for spatial testing of interventions in the real world. The Vertical Village research was conceived as a collaboration between MVRDV, The Why Factory- a global think tank and research institute run by MVRDV and Delft University of Technology, and the JUT Foundation for Arts and Architecture in Taipei. It was previously shown in Taipei, Seoul, Hamburg, Sao Paolo and Shanghai.
Beijing Design Week 2015 features top designers and innovators from The Netherlands and China , including MVRDV, DROOG Foundation, NEXT Architects; NL Architects, Powerhouse Company; UNStudio and WEST 8. The Nurturing House has been initiated and curated by the ROAM Foundation. The Exhibition was designed by Powerhouse Company and LAVA Beijing, with MVRDV designing its own space to house the Next Hutong Research. The exhibition was executed by The Pin Project, Perfect Crossovers, and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, with generous support from the Creative Industries Fund.
