Winy Maas has designed famous and high-profile buildings such as the Markthal and the Depot art-storage facility here in Rotterdam. But you can find his designs outside the Netherlands as well because Winy works all over the world.

He was born in Schijndel, a village between Eindhoven and Den Bosch in the south of the Netherlands, in 1959. His father owned a garden centre and his mother worked as a florist. Winy studied landschape architecture in Boskoop and then architecture and urband planning in Delft. A few years after graduating in 1990, he and his fellow architects Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries started up the MVRDV agency. It developed into an international agency known for its innovative designs. MVRDV has offices in Berlin, Paris, New York and Shanghai but its headquarters are still here, in Rotterdam.

In addition, Winy is a professor of Architecture and Urban Planning at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and leads The Why Factory, a think tank for future cities. The main questions that Winy tries to answer his work are how do you prepare a modern city for the future? And how do you make sure that it remains a pleasant place to live and work in?