“Past, Present, Future: About being an architect yesterday, today and beyond” is a series of video interviews conducted by Itinerant Office. Eleven internationally renowned architects have been asked to talk about their own past, present and future, exploring the figure of the architect and his or her role in contemporary society.

The second instalment of this series is a conversation with Jacob van Rijs, a co-founder of the firm MVRDV in Rotterdam. The Dutch architect talks about how his office is evolving. From its 1998 publication Farmax (an acronym for “extreme floor area ratio”) to its recent use of contemporary technology and methods to analyse cities, the firm has cultivated one constant interest: urban density.

“The general public thinks that the architect is a kind of a god, but that’s not the fact. There are other powers that are shaping our profession. And there’s s lot of construction happening without architects. It used to be like that before as well, but now is getting more visible.”