‘Out of the blue foam’. MVRDV’s Didden Village as a full-scale model

For almost two decades MVRDV (Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, Nathalie de Vries) of Rotterdam is known for the provocative, ludic and imaginative tone of its architectural proposals and a symbolic and experimental use of color often becomes the hallmark that integrates architectures made of elementary volumes. One example is the Didden Village, an extension of a traditional row house of late nineteenth century by the superposition of two elementary volumes widely used for the game of the couple's children: two boxes in concrete with a pitched roof. The designers describe it as a "crown on top of the monument", where the crown is the new building and the monument is the building below. As a vernacular element out of its context, the Village comes obviously in contrast with the modernist buildings around it, but the choice of painting it entirely of blue declines further this contrast in color and texture terms with neighbors brick-and-stone coatings. The meticulously monochrome solution, combined with an almost sculptural definition of volumes which are practically free of architectural details, gives unity to all the parts of the micro-village and enhances the effects of sunlight. But the choice of blue, complementary to the warm red chosen for the interior, hides other objectives that can only partially reduced to mimetic issues in order to virtually disappear against the sky (a phenomenon that might be rare given the latitude). Used without interruption, the blue transforms external volumes into something suspended between an out-of-scale design object and a Pop Art installation, not far from Oldenburg & Van Bruggen’s "ordinary objects depicted in monumental scale". The blue, or rather the cyan, appears rather a color chosen for its manifest artificiality in the urban landscape. As a possible prototype for a new type of expansion of the historic towns, the building is designed and built like a model, like one of those rough maquette in blue foam — the material so beloved by the Dutch designers — at full scale, in order to stage a sort of fanciful architectural representation in the middle of gray Dutch city.