With art being such a fundamental and ubiquitous part of our society and culture, MVRDV’s contribution to PAN is not only based upon bringing art into the city, but rather to see the city as one giant piece of art. This campaign thus becomes an invitation to shift our focus on the way we look at cities and spark new discussions: How can we build inclusive, innovative and democratic spaces using art as a framing device? ArtCity illustrates how artistic and creative interventions can transform our built environments and reimagine cities as diverse, artistic human environments.

PAN’s website was carefully scraped, downloading every image available, then the data was analysed, synthesised, and sorted. Each artwork was sorted with different identifiers, such as artist, colour, format, and movement – distinguishing if they were baroque, post-modern, abstract, and so on.

With the goal to create an urban landscape which not only reflected the extensive diversity of artwork of PAN, but also conveyed the idea that art permeates every corner of our environment, the designers started to remodel this enormous cloud of data into a 3D city. To do this, they transformed the art collection into 3D renders, conceptualising artworks as buildings that would give the impression of an urban landscape.