This week our guest lecturer Winy Maas, invited as part of the Spring Lecture Series 2017, inspired the audience with their lecture: WEGO: Between man-kind and robot-kind.

Winy Maas is an architect, urban designer and landscape architect and one of the co-founding directors of the globally operating architecture and urban planning firm MVRDV, based in Rotterdam, Netherlands, known for projects such as the Expo 2000, the vision for greater Paris, Grand Paris Plus Petit, the Market Hall in Rotterdam and more recently the Crystal Houses in Amsterdam.

He is furthermore professor at and director of The Why Factory, a research institute for the future city, he founded in 2008 at TU Delft.

Maas pointed out that more funding is needed to do research and to produce visualisations on future mobility, future democracies, future economies, future healthiness, etc. before taking us through some of the latest projects of MVRDV and The Why Factory.

From the wish for common sense in a world that seems to be dominated by individualism (WEGO City) to the hope and need for acceleration of the green agenda in (Green Dream); from the push for the combination of small scale in densification actions (The Vertical Village) to the excitement and amazement of the new material changes in (Barba).