The Hanover pavilion was “a utopian formula born of necessity to allow the unlimited creation of new real estate,” wrote the critic Holger Liebs. It was “a practical model for the reinvention of the world.”

Image Exterior stairs at Mirador, a 22-story residential building in Madrid. Credit... Julian Faulhaber for The New York Times

At the architectural library at the Delft University of Technology, there’s a copy of a 736-page book by MVRDV called “Farmax: Excursions on Density,” which is a hodgepodge of essays, transcripts, photos, computer designs, graphs and charts, all examining the growing suburban “grayness” of the Dutch landscape and proposing different solutions for saving the pastoral landscape by “carrying density to extremes.” So many students have borrowed, read and plundered that copy of “Farmax” that it had to be pulled from circulation and has sat in a state of complete disintegration inside a kind of glass vitrine. When I mentioned this to van Rijs, he laughed and said: “Yeah, I’ve seen that. Our book is like a museum piece. Isn’t that fun?”

While projects like VPRO and the Hanover pavilion were leading to design commissions in Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris, Tokyo and China’s Sichuan province, MVRDV was also reaching outside the realm of established architectural practice by producing a series of theoretical exercises  books, films, exhibitions, even computer games  that amounted to an ongoing propaganda war on behalf of the firm’s radical ideas about space. After “Farmax,” MVRDV put out another doorstop manifesto, “KM3: Excursions on Capacities,” which warned that if the global population “behaved with U.S.-citizen-like consumption,” another four earths would be required to sustain it. In the exhibit 3D City, they pushed ever upward, advocating giant stacking cities that, as MVRDV breathlessly described them, exist “not only in front, behind or next to you, but also above and below. In short a city in which ground-level zero no longer exists but has dissolved into a multiple and simultaneous presence of levels where the town square is replaced by a void or a bundle of connections; where the street is replaced by simultaneous distribution and divisions of routes and is expanded by elevators, ramps and escalators. . . .”

Perhaps MVRDV’s most ambitious theoretical exercise was the traveling computer installation they called MetaCity/Datatown. Predicting that globalism and an exploding planetary population will push certain regions throughout the world into continuous urban fields, or megacities, MVRDV conceived a hypothetical city called Datatown, designed solely from extrapolations of Dutch statistics. (“It is a city that wants to be explored only as information; a city that knows no given topography, no prescribed ideology, no representation, no context. Only huge, pure data.”) According to its creators, Datatown was a self-sufficient city with the population of the United States (250 million) crammed into an area the size of Georgia (60,000 square miles), making it the densest place on earth. MVRDV then subjected this urban Frankenstein to 21 scenarios to see how they would affect the built environment: What if all the residents of Datatown wanted to live in detached houses? What if they preferred urban blocks? What could be done with the waste? (Build 561 ski resorts.) What kind of city park would be needed? (A million Central Parks stacked up over 3,884 floors.) “The seas, the oceans (rising as a result of global warming), the polar icecaps, all represent a reduction in the territory available for the megacity. Does that mean that we must colonize the Sahel, the oceans or even the moon to fulfill our need for air and space, to survive? Or can we find an intelligent way to expand the capacities of what already exists?”

On one level, MetaCity/Datatown was a game and a provocation  architecture as a kind of thought experiment: can the urban landscape be reduced to a string of ones and zeroes? Is what we think of as outward reality nothing more than the physical manifestation of information? But MetaCity/Datatown was also a serious investigation: by translating the chaos of the contemporary city into pure information  or, as MVRDV called it, a datascape  and then showing the spatial consequences of that datascape through computer-generated designs, MVRDV set out to reveal how our collective choices and behaviors come to mold our constructed environments. “These datascapes show that architectural design in the traditional sense only plays a very limited role,” Bart Lootsma, an architectural historian, writes in one of many essays inspired by the exhibit. “It is the society, in all its complexities and contradictions, that shapes the environment in the most detailed way, producing ‘gravity fields’ in the apparent chaos of developments, hidden logics that eventually ensure that whole areas acquire their own special characteristics  even at a subconscious level.” Lootsma cites a number of these invisible forces  market demands precipitating a “slick” of houses-with-gardens in the Netherlands, political constraints generating “piles” of dwellings on the outskirts of Hong Kong, the cultural preference for white brick causing a “white cancer” of housing estates in the Dutch province of Friesland. These are “the ‘scapes’ of the data behind it,” he writes.