An architectural design exhibition, one of the few shows of its kind in the country where construction sites prevail, is taking place at the Shanghai Gallery of Art.

The exhibition, which runs until August 21 at the gallery at Bund No 3, is titled "MVRDV KM3: Proposals for Chinese cities" and features 25 designs under construction or evaluation for both Chinese and foreign cities by the Dutch design studio MVRDV.

Its curator, Terence Riley, is chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The exhibition highlights both the opportunities and problems facing architecture and urbanism today, according to Riley.

"In the view of Italian Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti, everything that was ideal was ideal in all its parts. In other words, an ideally conceived city would be constituted of ideal architecture, each detail of which would be in turn recognizable as an ideal fragment," said Riley.

However, in the industrialized modern world, "architects seem content to contain their idealism to the villas, museums and concert halls that are effectively the by-products of economic growth, the un-designed, market-driven urban expansion that characterizes every corner of the earth where buildings are being erected."

The curator believes MVRDV's works are based on a new relationship between architecture and urbanism. Indeed, the young Dutch architects are proposing a fresh style as famous Western architects of an older generation have left their signature on most major cities in the developing country.

Through investigation and use of complex amounts of data that accompany contemporary design processes, they accept a contemporary city as it is, involving in their designs the fundamental elements of contemporary life such as production, consumption and mobility, and at the same time emphasizing ecological balance and sustainability.

MVDRV was set up in Rotterdam in 1991 by Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, and Natalie de Vries.

Its early projects, such as the headquarters for the Dutch Public Broadcasting Company VPRO and WoZoCo housing for the elderly in Amsterdam, brought its architects to a wide field of clients and won them international acclaim.

(China Daily July 8, 2005)