Live interview with Ben van Berkel as part of Virtual Design Festival
UNStudio founder Ben van Berkel spoke to Dezeen in this Screentime conversation sponsored by Enscape as part of Virtual Design Festival.
The Dutch architect discussed the work of UNStudio with Dezeen's founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs.
Van Berkel founded the studio together with Caroline Bos in 1988. It has previously designed proposals for a series of sustainable smart cities including a neighbourhood in the Netherlands where residents produce their own resources and control the use of their data, and a masterplan for a smart city in Bangalore whose buildings are painted white to cool them down and reduce the need for air conditioning.
UNStudio associate director and senior architect Marianthi Tatari spoke about the firm's work on smart neighbourhoods in a lecture we streamed as part of VDF's collaboration with Prague conference reSITE.
The firm recently revealed plans for a skyscraper in Dubai which features a 300-metre-high ceramic tile facade, and has completed an urban hub for living, retail, working and hospitality in Hangzhou, China.
Projects by UNStudio currently under construction include a cable car system for the city of Gothenburg in Sweden and the first ever cross-border cable car connecting Russia and China.
The interview is part of our VDF Screentime series, a series of live interviews which has featured trend forecaster Li Edelkoort, New York architecture practice SO-IL, design studio Space Popular and architect Alison Brooks.
This Screentime conversation is sponsored by Enscape, a virtual reality and real-time rendering plugin for architectural design programme Autodesk Revit.
Virtual Design Festival is the world's first online design festival, taking place from 15 April to 30 June. For more information, or to be added to the mailing list, contact us at [email protected].
Portrait of van Berkel is by Els Zweerink.