Why not? asks Dutch architect Winy Maas, who puts colour and fun into the buildings he designs. Emma Cullinan reports

A TOWER block for pigs, homes in a cemetery, and high-rise buildings in Alpine mountain ranges are just some of the ideas that Winy Maas and members of his practice MVRDV Architects in The Netherlands, have come up with.

They sound strange, but Maas can explain them all logically and often manages to sell them to clients, government officials and planners: the stacked pigs, living organically, is a practical solution for a high-density country that eats a lot of pork; the cemetery idea stems from Maas's thoughts that life and death are associated, so why split them and why disconnect from someone you loved?

The Alpine towers are another proposition in the ongoing global debate about where to put high-rise: in Dublin, he says, throwing more ideas into the conversation. Perhaps we could put towers on an island out to sea. The concepts keep coming and little is off the agenda.

You may laugh at some of his notions but the thoughtful Maas - who is working on his first project in Ireland - will just smile and carry on with the next point. (His Irish project is a mixed use scheme just outside Dublin, but that's all he is prepared to say about it at the moment.)

He has become used to controversy but Maas has also managed to build some amazing constructions and MVRDV - which he set up 15 years ago with Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries - has become the darling of many young architects.

In one housing scheme for old people in Amsterdam, there wasn't room in the block's footprint to create the required 100 units, so the firm "hung" some of the apartments off the façade, resulting in impressive cantilevers.

In another scheme, the Silodam apartments in Amsterdam, there were negotiations with all sorts of interested parties, from residents to planning authorities, yet rather than compromising with a dull structure, the practice designed a multi-coloured block that sits on the water like a large ship. "You give people a choice," says Maas. "You say: 'What's better, monochrome or colour?' "

Housing in The Netherlands has embraced colour , while Ireland is still quite wary about bright hues. "Architecture has only a limited amount of materials to work with - bricks, steel and glass - so if you want to enlarge the scope, you use colour," says Maas, who points out that it's not always easy to persuade people about the more dazzling tints.

A bright orange building MVRDV created for a design office upset the neighbours and the debate reached television screens and the courts. When the architects were asked to come up with a new pigment, they opted for military camouflage.

"It ended up back in the press because they said that the architects weren't being serious and were making fun of it," says Maas, matter of factly. "Now it's green: just finished." (Log onto www.mvrdv.nl to see Studio Thonik in its original orange glory).

There's nothing like these buildings in Ireland: could that be because planners would baulk at such ideas? "There's a fear of failing and being sued," says Maas. "Planners carry that load on their shoulders and that makes them very protective. It's a question of how to work with that protectiveness. It's a very collaborative process. You need to discuss with everybody what the process will be and the direction that it should take. You need to show the advantages and the fun that can be made out of it as well as the public and functional benefits that it could lead to.

"One thing that is horrible in society is fear: it leads to excessive control and investment in things that you don't want," says Maas.

Both Silodam and the Wozoco hanging apartments show a very practical response to a logistical design problem, but there is also inventiveness, beauty and wit. "Humour and irony are substantial in life. It doesn't mean that a building should just be hilarious and not serious: buildings are a serious investment. But wittiness is liberating and makes it easier to talk about even heavier issues," says Maas, who seems to spend a lot of time coming up with innovative and delightful solutions.

As he says, 90 per cent of buildings are mediocre and so "why don't we work with the mediocre?" Maas has a touch of the Pollyanna about him, taking on gloomy issues and looking for the positive aspect. While people will talk about the negative aspects of high density living, for instance, he finds the positives too.

"One consequence of density is that you meet people and I love people. So there's a fascinating contradiction; considering proximity as beauty which you have to combine with the considered negatives, such as noise, the fact that you sometimes want to be alone and that people want gardens."

Creating solutions specific to each site and client and perpetual creative thinking means that each of the practice's projects are different and that is something which Maas often gets asked about: "I cannot explain it in terms of, this is what our work is about".

So there's no pattern as with Gehry or Libeskind? "Exactly, or like Zaha, when you know what you're going to get." The line that runs through all of the practice's work, says Maas, is the fact that it is process driven and the resulting buildings are very explicit.

"That helps to explain the success of our office with the younger generation," says Maas. "The buildings are highly communicable to students. That started with a reaction against the mythicism that some of the previous generation used; with their big hats, long hair and gesturing with pencils. I have enormous skepticism about these myths and want to get rid of that silence."

Some people are still frightened of architects, though. "True, people are frightened of architects," says Maas, who is doing his bit to change that.