Let us introduce the first completed project by the fine folks from MVRDV, an architect studio based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. I had the chance the visit their studio and they deliver incredible works like the current and very famous Tianjin Binhai Library located in the District of Binhai in the Municipality of Tianjin. Back to today, let us introduce Future Towers; 1,068 apartments for a diverse section of the rapidly expanding population, a true vertical village that will house around 5,000 people in one building. One building! Apartments ranging from 45 square metres to 450 square metres are mixed together, a diversity enabled by the building’s mountainous shape and the shifting floor plans that it generates.

Future Towers is a part of Amanora Park Town, a community created in 2007 thanks to legislation passed in 2005 by the state of Maharashtra to encourage the development of residential “townships” near its cities. In Pune, these townships help to house the young professionals attracted to the city by its auto-manufacturing and technology sectors but, as with much of the rapid development all over India, many of the new buildings on Pune’s outskirts are generic, repetitive residential towers. In just 11 years, Amanora Park Town has grown to over 25,000 residents by focusing on a diverse, high-quality mixture of towers alongside low-density villas. But the pressure to expand faster with more high-density, low-individuality housing was ever-present.

More Links

• Studio Site

MVRDV’s design for the Future Towers aimed to offer an alternative to this pattern, while still delivering apartments at the usual low price (since competition for new residents between different housing developments is fierce). Instead of a cluster of freestanding buildings, MVRDV’s response to the brief was a singular mountainous structure with peaks and valleys, under which 1,068 apartments are unified in one building. However, despite its expressive appearance, the design of Future Towers in fact stems from a series of methodical decisions based on MVRDV’s research into Indian housing.

Architecture

Credits

• Design: MVRDV
• Principal-in-charge: Jacob van Rijs
• Head of Department: Stefan de Koning
• Design Team: Oana Rades, Saimon Idiakez, Doris Strauch, Maria Lopez Calleja, Akshey Venkatesh, Wenhua Deng, Jose Ignacio Velasco Martin, Pepijn Bakker, Kate Van Heusen, Ignacio Zabalo, Silke Volkert, Sara Bjelke, Nuray Karakurt, and Ivo Hoppers
• Project Negotiation: Inger Kammeraat
• Copyright: MVRDV 2018 – (Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, Nathalie de Vries)
• Photographs: © Ossip van Duivenbode