The Green Dip offers ways to reintroduce nature into our cities, by critically examining architectural strategies and green solutions.

The research group The Why Factory (Delft University of Technology) has produced a series of visualizations of various greened cities (Hong Kong, São Paulo, Dubai and many more). These visualizations respond to the analysis and calculations made for each of the biomes in which the cities are located. The visualizations are accompanied by sets of objective data, from the amount of oxygen that can be produced, via the gallons of water than can be stored, to the number of birds that can be provided with a habitat.

Ultimately, The Green Dip provides an innovative method to calculate the environmental benefits and estimate the costs of greening our cities. The research offers ways to reintroduce nature into our homes and claims that agriculture, forestry and organic production can be the catalyst for other ways of making the metropolis.@en

Cultivating and stirring up urgencies: wait and plan.Spotlighting the jewels of North-Holland.Formulating new tasks to speed up housingconstruction.Quicker, cheaper, nicer, and more adaptive living through changeable and modular thinking, and becoming more sustainable by lengthening the timechain (prefab to the max).Architecture students are explorers of new practical and technical products that contribute to housing development.Calculate and estimate the effect of technical innovation of one million homes in terms of carbon, ecology, and materials.Consideration of ecological, social, and aesthetic aspects of urban planning and landscape.Do not abandon the landscape: we need a bigger voice on this from architects and landscape architects.Conduct the conversations on the future on a yearly basis.Strengthen bonds with industry.

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With (w)EGO: Dream Homes in Density, The Why Factory investigates participatory processes applied to housing design. These processes establish a negotiation among the desires of each of the residents of a housing slab and help determine the design of their apartments. To achieve this, Wegocity manifests a particular interest in the development of a gaming process. This game leverages the specificities of each resident and transforms them into spatial needs. This way, unexpected housing typologies emerge within a truly human-driven residential building.@en

Le Grand Puzzle is the urban study, commissioned by Manifesta 13 Marseille to the Rotterdam based architectural studio MVRDV and The Why Factory led by Winy Maas.

The book is the result of intensive research – made from 2018 to the start of 2020 – by an international team of architects and urbanists, in collaboration with Manifesta 13 and representatives of both Marseille institutions and universities. Le Grand Puzzle proposes a methodology, an agenda and an analysis to portray today’s Marseille and can be perceived as a ‘manifesto’ for the city.@en

From the urgencies seen in contemporary societies and urban situations, it is obvious that it is time to begin thinking about our cities in completely new ways. The urban environment has become fundamentally different in many aspects, but we are still trying to physically define it in the same way as before. And we are almost paralyzed in what seems to be a splintered and contradictory reality. On the one hand cities and communities are highly individualistic and increasingly based on the individual unit, and on the other hand global connectivity and awareness is proliferating in almost all our daily activities. There is a need to find ways of bringing together these two extremities — the individual and the collective — from both ends and both conceptually and practically, into possible constructions.@en

Our current cities are comprised of enclosed, distant and introverted architecture equally isolated from urban life and ecological context.

How might we open these spaces? How might we introduce pockets of space capable of triggering social encounters, multiplying circulation and facilitating the introduction of flora and fauna?

This book gathers the research conducted by The Why Factory into what we term ‘urban porosity’. Using both analogue and digital approaches, our researchers and students explored modes to open up our cities. What might be imagined to open our towers and city blocks? Stepped floors? Public stairways? Grottos in which city dwellers might meet? Could we manipulate building envelopes in order to increase façade area? Might we perforate built volumes and thus create pocket parks?

Each of our hypotheses led to a series of step-by-step interventions that materialized in the form of a vast collection of towers built by our students using LEGO blocks. When gathered together, the resulting army of LEGO towers shows how far we can—and cannot—go. How much can a tower bend before it collapses? At what point does a porous tower become financially impossible to build or maintain?
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Copy Paste is the tenth book in the Why Factory’s Future Cities Series. Copy Paste is an invitation to copy with finesse and skill. Copy Paste understands the past as a vast archive on which we can and must build. Copy Paste is a reader in the art of evolution. Copy Paste is a bad ass copy guide. Instead of mocking the culture of copycats, design could learn better how to make good fakes: fakes good enough to beat their references. Copy Paste explores the tactical evolution of architecture. It brings together discussions on ethical and legal constraints, genealogy, reference, geometry and psychology with art historical evidence that copying might be older –more original even- than originality.@en

The Why Factory makes space for free time. With its flexible working hours, cheap flights to every far-off corner of the planet and the possibility of downloading all the films, TV programmes or songs ever produced, our world has become a society of leisure devotees and connoisseurs of pleasure. We can have every imaginable exotic dish delivered, we can purchase every-thing we have ever dreamed of possessing, we can organize the tailor-made holiday of our dreams – pleasure is on tap for us 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. But who is paying attention to the reserves while we are amusing ourselves? Is enough being produced to meet the demands of ever-increasing consumption? In this publication The Why Factory demonstrates the size of the footprint that our leisure activities have left behind on our landscapes, cities and architecture. But that is not all: the architectural and urban projects presented here problematize the leisure activities of today and outline the possibility of a new solution. The volume includes articles by Winy Maas, Felix Madrazo and Alexander Sverdlov. It also provides a platform for minds critical of modern-day recreation as well as for the professionals in this line of business, those who keep the leisure machine running. @en