71 | Integration
Interview with Nathalie de Vries
Design Process and Integration by Erron Estrado and Tania Cortés Vargas
Nathalie de Vries is a co-founder and principal architect and urban designer of MVRDV. De Vries is renowned for a diverse body of work in a variety of scales and typologies that are grounded in
connecting
individuals,
communities
and
environments. She also engages as Professor of Architectural Design at Delft University of Technology and is the former Chairman of the Royal Institute of Dutch Architects (BNA). What prompted you and your partners to start MVRDV? What were you looking to achieve? At the time [my partners and I] all had jobs at other offices after graduating in 1990. After one or two years things started to itch a little bit. You’re working for someone else so you’re working basically with the ideas of the office and we had the urge to also do something with our own ideas. So we decided to collaborate on the Europan competition. Teams for Europan are sometimes friends, sometimes almost accidental. But in our case, we were three people who knew each other and thought we could contribute to the future of housing through this competition and give our statements. That didn’t start
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