Green Villa is a four-storey building with an underground garage: on the ground floor there will be an office for the developer Stein, above - five apartments. The building will appear in the town of Sint-Michilsgestel in the Dutch province of North Brabant, not far from its capital, 's-Hertogenbosch. Construction should begin as early as 2020.
The construction site is in the corner of the above ground parking lot on the southern edge of the town, where the development transforms into the natural environment on the banks of the Dommel River. This borderline position is reflected in the project: the outlines of the Green Villa repeat the houses with roof roofs on Adrianusplein, but its facade is a "rack" with pots, where forsythia, jasmine, pine and birch are planted. The construction continues the line of MVRDV research on urban greening:
no façade projects such as this one can cool the environment, balance CO2 emissions, and support biodiversity. At the same time, taking into account the pots in Sint-Michilsgestel, one cannot but recall the Parisian prototype.
Green Villa received a rectangular modular plan of 3 x 4 cells. Each of them can be occupied by any function from the catalog. A similar catalog was made for the facade: for each cell of the "rack" you can choose one or another type of landscaping, depending on the orientation relative to the cardinal points, the function of the room behind it (private or public), the views that open from there
The landscaping of the facade is considered by architects as a nursery or even a semblance of a botanical garden: the plants will be provided with labels and explanatory plates. The sensor irrigation system will be powered by the collected rainwater.
The co-creator of MVRDV and the developer of Green Villa is Van Boven Architecten. Its head Theoberd van Boven and MVRDV co-founder Winy Mas went to school in Sint-Michilsgestel, so they wanted to create a socially conscious and environmentally progressive project for the town. They have already worked together on a project to expand their former school, Beckwleet Gymnasium. Note that this is not the first "personal" project for Winnie Mas: the "Glass Farm" MVRDV was built in his native Scheindel.
