UNStudio : the floating space

UN Studio, led by Dutch architects Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, creates spaces that are surprisingly innovative.

Their work doesn't rehash Modernism but rather embraces the digital age via the invention of new, time-based techniques expanding the imagination, exploding the hierarchy of the design process, and encouraging the input of different disciplines.

UN Studio's architecture is the result of a design strategy that repeatedly and constantly advances in different ways via leitmotifs called "design models." The most important examples of this new kind of architecture are the New Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart and the Erasmus bridge in Rotterdam, which has become the town's new landmark.

Another manifest aim is to come up with fundamentally new ideas for complex infrastructure projects and to give these a contemporary structure that fosters future (including urban) development.This can be seen, for example, at the central train station in Arnhem, at the Ponte Parodi pier in Genoa, and at the Canadian Centre for Architecture's (CCA) prestigious "Competition for the Design of Cities." This book presents an overview of UN Studio's work to date.