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Mixed Use Architecture

Future Towers / MVRDV

Curated by María Francisca González
Architects: MVRDV
Area Area of this architecture project Area: 140000 m²
Year Completion year of this architecture project Year: 2018
Photographs Photographs: Ossip van Duivenbode
Civil Engineer : J+W with Umesh Joshi
Structural Engineer : J+W with Umesh Joshi
Head Of Department: Stefan de Koning
Design Team: Oana Rades, Saimon Idiakez, Doris Strauch, Maria Lopez Calleja, Akshey Venkatesh, Wenhua Deng, Nacho Velasco, Pepijn Bakker, Kate Van Heusen, Ignacio Zabalo, Silke Volkert, Sara Bjelke, Nuray Karakurt, Ivo Hoppers
Project Negotiation: Inger Kammeraat
PMC: Northcroft with Narenda Bhagwat, Nikita Oak, Satin Walla
Co Architects: Client team
C&S: J+W with Umesh Joshi
MEP: Client team
Program: Mixed-use, housing, commercial space and public amenities.
Principal In Charge: Jacob van Rijs
Client: CCL Amanora Park Town
Project Management Consultancy: Northcroft with Narenda Bhagwat, Nikita Oak, Satin Walla
City: Pune
Country: India

Text description provided by the architects. Located in Pune , India’s 8th largest city and one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, Future Towers provides 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.

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.

Future Towers / MVRDV - Door, Arch, Windows

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.

A critical deviation from the norm was to convince the client that the entire development would be more vibrant with a mixture of different units. This way, the building would ensure that users from the full spectrum of India’s exploding middle class all mingle—including young, mobile professionals who are new to the city; older, established residents; and families both large and small, all at a range of income levels. 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.

“In Asia cities are growing so fast, and uniform repetitive residential towers are the norm”, says Jacob van Rijs, principal and co-founder of MVRDV. “With our design, we are making an effort to offer more variety and bring people from more different backgrounds together. In the original master plan, 16 separate towers were planned, all of which would have more or less the same type of apartments. The MVRDV team thoroughly researched modern Indian housing and came up with a system to create a mix of different types of apartment inside one building. This project will attract residents with a variety of incomes, something that will benefit the diversity of Amanora Park Town. Thanks to the client’s willingness to try something new, the efficiency needed for mass housing has been achieved without cutting back on residents’ comfort.”

Because construction costs are low in India, and elevators comparatively expensive, the economics usually applied to residential design could be inverted; thus a reduced number of lift cores combined with corridors were in this case more economically desirable than having many towers, each with its own core and fewer corridors. As a result of this calculation, MVRDV’s design features 9 housing wings ranging from 17 to 30 storeys arranged around just 4 circulation cores.

The slabs form a hexagonal grid, which allows for wide views from the apartments and leaves large open public courtyards at ground level. The ‘peaks’ allow for optimized daylight conditions and the resulting inclined roofs allow for a number of exterior terraces, both private and communal. Recessed balconies on the main facades of the residential slabs themselves hint at the diversity of the homes behind, with a mixture of normal size, double-height, double-width and even some L-shaped balconies. The strong graphical appearance created by the balconies is accentuated by large, brightly coloured openings known as “scoops” that puncture the building’s façade to connect with the central corridor, providing public meeting spaces and cross ventilation in all communal spaces in the process. These spaces—which originated in the need to provide refuge spaces to meet the fire code requirements for long corridors—help to give a sense of “neighbourhood identity” to different parts of the building, with each scoop designated for a different activity (such as yoga or mini golf) or for a different type of resident (such as teens or toddlers).

The courtyards below are linked by four-storey-high triangular gates, creating a 500-metre-long walk, and also feature different uses, with some designated for play, and others for sport, garden spaces, and more. This impressive list of amenities was made possible by the scale of the development: With so many apartments in one project, luxury features such as a 50-metre lap pool only add a fraction to the overall cost.

While much of MVRDV’s approach focused on rethinking Indian housing, the design also recognises which features should carry over from typical housing developments. A simple yet effective natural ventilation system, which both cools the apartments and can help extract air from kitchens, helps to make personal air conditioning units optional for residents. The floor plans also incorporate the principles of Vastu Shastra, the traditional system of architecture (often described as India’s answer to Feng Shui) that has long been expected of new developments in India.

The completed building is just the first phase of the larger Future Towers project at Amanora Park Town, which comprises 3 phases and around 3500 dwellings in total. MVRDV is currently working on the second phase of the project.

Though “context-sensitive”, “diverse”, and “community-focused” may not be the first terms that come to mind when imagining a building that houses over 5,000 people, MVRDV’s Future Towers is an attempt to upend those perceptions. It is a building that understands the demands of Indian housing and the expectations of Indian culture, and uses the context of a brand new township to reimagine how they can be combined in a way that is better for both residents and cities at large.

Project gallery

Project location

Address: amanora park town, hadapsar, pune, maharashtra, india.

Materials and Tags

Sustainability

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印度浦那“未来之塔” / MVRDV

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This opulent Mumbai apartment is a case study in functional design

Showcasing exemplary modular contemporary design, DIG Architects transformed a run-down 530-square-feet Mumbai apartment into a luminous luxury suite. Copper Cube Haus, which is located in an unlikely old building in the bylanes of Andheri, is a case study in creative problem solving, and an example of how good design is always ripe for the challenge. “The brief was pretty out of the box,” admits DIG Architects co-founder, Amit Khanolkar. The client is originally from Goa, but travels frequently, and has to transit through Mumbai very often. “He got tired of staying in hotels each time, and decided to get something of his own.” He acquired a small apartment in a nondescript building close to the airport, and was looking to convert it into a secondary transit home. “His idea was to create a kind of studio or lounge, where he could even conduct meetings from home,” says Khanolkar. The challenge, however, lay in making the most of the cramped, poorly-designed floor plan. “The apartment itself was a 1BHK, with a very linear layout,” explains Khanolkar. “The challenge was to open up the entire space, while making a bold statement at the same time.” Copper is the basis of the design palette, which is otherwise a wash of black and vitrified cementitious tiling. The copper cube, from which the project gets its name, is a copper sheet-clad kitchen unit that systematically partitions the living space and master bedroom. “We wanted to be somewhere in the vicinity of contemporary, dark, and a little industrial,” says Khanolkar. “The copper gets its importance because most of the materials around it are very muted.”

Copper is the basis of the design palette

In that vein, all architectural lighting was kept under 3000K colour temperature, which is yellow or golden, to give the copper its due. The result is a home that has the ambience of a plush hotel suite. “We try to be consistent in our design,” explains Khanolkar, “We know that with one or two materials, you can make a strong statement. It’s about designing responsibly.”

Living Room

The living room is furnished sparingly with a TV console, a sofa and a side table. In the centre, a table and arrangement of chairs doubles as a dining table or work-from-home table. A movable fabric screen, framed in aluminium, slides across the window—it functions as a curtain while allowing the overall volume of the space to appear seamless. A custom rug from Weavers Knot underlines the space, while a pendant light completes the arrangement. A large artwork, customised to compliment the volum etric theme of the house, provides a soft backdrop to the scene.

The focal point of the house is the kitchen, from which the project gets its name. The eponymous “copper cube” is a modular kitchen unit clad in copper sheets. The cube appears to be detached from the ceiling, thereby raising the visual height of the space and also making room for a ceiling-mounted air conditioner. All cabinets and shelves within the unit are also clad in copper sheets, and a copper inlay extends along the floor, thereby defining the cubic structure within the visual space. The front portion of the kitchen, which shares space with the living room, has been fitted with bar stools to provide additional seating. A slit in the middle offers visual connectivity between the kitchen and living room, making the unit appear more spacious. The walls around the cube are clad in black tiles that extend all the way to the master bedroom at the far end of the house. The top of the kitchen unit is wrapped in Barrisol, a fabric that distributes the light evenly across the copper surfaces. “It completely washes the copper and makes it more opulent,” explains Khanolkar, “The mood of the space is quite dark, so by using this Barrisol, we’re highlighting the primary theme, which is the copper cube.”

This nostalgic Bengaluru villa echoes the vernacular homes of Hubli

Master Bedroom

A sliding door, cleverly concealed within the kitchen cube, can be pulled forward to create a private master bedroom that includes the master bath. “The doors don’t take up circulation space,” explains Khanolkar, “They disappear into the walls, so there is no visual interruption.” The master bedroom appears almost like a framed tableau, a birch ply-clad cube that is set within a thick wrap clad in black. The wrap makes room for concealed storage, both around and within the cube of the master bedroom. A full length mirror, a ceiling-height shelving unit and drawers within the base plinth make up what will function as the dressing area. The birch ply cube is the sleeping unit, fitted with a modular bed and a built-in side table, the base of which can be opened for additional storage. As in the living room, the only window in the master bedroom can be accessed by sliding back a framed work of wall art. The TV wall opposite the master bed is a fluted surface that also opens out to reveal additional storage compartments. “Smaller houses require this kind of utility,” insists Khanolkar, “and every square inch of the space that is available for storage and utility has to be made use of.”

The master bedroom appears almost like a framed tableau

The birch ply cube is the sleeping unit, fitted with a modular bed

The theme of black is fully realised in the master bathroom, which is entirely clad in a mosaic of black ceramic tiles. White grouting offers a stern contrast, and gives the space “a digital look,” as Khanolkar describes it. “We were very minimalistic in our design for this space,” he adds, “The mosaic itself, which is busy, does the job.” Black granite shelves and a black ceramic basin enhance the palette. Copper accents appear as towel rods and racks, and the countertop which is entirely clad in copper sheets.

The theme of black is fully realised in the master bathroom

Mumbai: Cool hues and a natural palette update this city apartment

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Norman Foster and his High-tech Architecture

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In 1970, land values were shooting up in Bombay, which resulted in the acceptance of high-rise residential buildings for the developers. Charles Correa accepted one such project in Columba Hill, South Mumbai. He already explored his concepts in the unbuilt cosmopolis of 1958 and the Rallis Apartment leading to the realization of the Kanchanjunga Apartments. Through the influence of vernacular architecture, the design responds to the changing conditions of the climate coupled with the rapid urbanization in the city. Kanchanjunga Apartments is a 32 story residential building consisting of luxury apartments on each floor. This project was done in collaboration with Pravina Mehta as the associate architect and Shirish Patel as the structural engineer.

Architect: Charles Correa
Location: Bombay, India
Completed on: 1983
Building Type: Skyscraper multi-family housing
Construction System: Concrete

The Problem

The location and climate of Bombay dispense architects with a dilemma in design. The east-west axis provides ample sightings of the Arabian Sea and the harbor with the added benefit of receiving all the sea breezes. The axis also harbors harsh afternoon sun and troublesome monsoon rains. The situation was unavoidable as the typology of the building is high-rise due to urbanization and high land prices. There was a need to seize the opportunities while carefully designing with limitations in mind.

The Solution

Correa used an indigenous approach to the spatial organization of a typical bungalow. The main living spaces with an enclosed verandah whilst turning that buffer zone into a garden, thriving on the problem. Because of climatic considerations with existing views, the massing settled upon a configuration facing east and west. Correa interlocked four different apartment units with small variations in levels on the floor leading to the eventual garden verandah suspended in the air. 32 apartments stacked over 28 stories form an interlock of 3 with 4 bedroom units and 5 with 6 bedroom units which reveal themselves through sheer end walls that support the cantilevers.

The Planning

The arrangement of apartments and the program of various units in the apartment is reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s Unite’ d’Habitation, with a difference of opening up as compared to horizontal corridors. There are two apartments on each floor with the tower core as vertical circulation, with split-level dwellings. The apartments vary from 180 to 420 square meters with bedrooms ranging from 3 to 6. All apartments have servant rooms that are directly connecting to the kitchen.

The interiors are detailing as compared to the simple exterior. Also, the double-height terrace differs from interior and exterior spaces. Within the flat, the users enlive with views of the city out of the living and bedrooms and terraces.

The Structure and Construction of Kanchanjunga Apartments

The building is a 32-story reinforced concrete structure cantilevering 6.3 meters for the open terraces. The central core addresses the lateral loads while providing for vertical circulation (elevators and staircases). Majorly known for the first building in India constructed through a slip method, that is, construction of the central core before the peripheral structure. So the method was necessary to address the cantilevered terraces. And the floors connect the facade with the structural core. The dual concrete construction forms a tube-in-tube system adding to the stability of the whole tower.

Also, Read Aranya Low-cost Housing by BV Doshi

The style certainly is not rigid. It has both aspects of traditional vernacular style through the experience of a bungalow and modern style in terms of its exterior and form. The verandahs being interpreted as garden terraces for each unit while incorporating concrete structure with the white panel areas show a fusion of the opposites that pioneer sustainable design integrated with indigenous environment controls. Therefore the style attracts and deserves attention to traditional interiors and modern exteriors.

The Takeaway Features of Kanchanjunga Apartments

32 unique apartments with four kinds of flats ranging from 3 to 6 bedrooms.
Shear end walls holding the cantilevered terrace while visually connecting the floors.
The base of the tower is 21 square meters and height is 84 meters which makes it a proportion of 1:4.
The double-height terraces are oriented against the sun to protect each apartment unit.
Large openings and terrace gardens provide transparency.

Overall, the techniques and concepts to address problems and opportunities provided by the context were relatively new. The building still stands today and is visiting by countless architecture enthusiasts. Inhabitants also enjoy the lifestyle in the tower that merges two different worlds of styles that were the personality of the architect itself.