Rients Dijkstra explains that he was working at OMA when he was asked to design a master plan for an expansion of Utrecht for 30,000 residents. He took the job and started the firm Maxwan. In Holland urban planning is conventionally understood to be focused on housing, but Dijkstra saw the urban planner’s role as harmonizing the ideas of the various participants in the design process. While working on the plan, Dijkstra discovered many of his proposals conflicted with conventional planning methodologies. The train station in Utrecht, Holland’s largest, already included a shopping mall, and Dijkstra was hired to add housing and office space. Dijkstra argued that a tower could only be justified by nice views, which wouldn’t exist from that site. Therefore he designed a low, multistory rectangular massing the length of the train station. Dijkstra was asked to design a number of bridges across a canal which crosses his new development near Utrecht. He wanted to ensure that pedestrian circulation was not an afterthought, so the bridges have circuitous pedestrian paths beside the traffic lanes.