Winy Maas is co-founder and principal architect of MVRDV, an interdisciplinary award-winning Dutch practice set up by Maas alongside Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries in 1993.

Besides his innovative, experimental, and theoretical work for MVRDV, Maas is Professor of Urbanism and Architecture at the Delft University of Technology. Here, in 2008, he founded The Why Factory, a research institute that he leads as director, exploring the possibilities for the development of our cities. Maas is guest editor of the Italian magazine Domus for 2019.

His motto? “I advocate denser, greener, more attractive and liveable cities, with an approach to design that centres around user-defined, innovative, and sustainable ideas for the built environment, regardless of typology or scale,” he says.

Photo by Barbra Vreij.