Designed by Oppenheim Architecture, Set on the banks of the Miami River, at the junction of Overtown and Little Havana, this modern office complex was commissioned as the U.S. headquarters for an international engineering and construction outfit GLF Construction Corporation. The building was designed with simplicity in mind, featuring large floor plates that allow user flexibility and evoke the feeling of open space. Inside, the program includes office and studio space, conference rooms, lounges, balconies and common areas that maximize both interior and exterior views.
Photography: Karen Fuchs
GLF Headquarters’ form draws inspiration from its adjacent context and scale – citing both the inherent industrial and nautical overtones of the location. The resulting 4-story structure resembles a stack of shipping containers – a common spectacle visible from the project site – strategically arranged to create large unique volumes and sheltered spaces that accommodate various uses. The elegant, yet simple, the exterior is the perfect amalgamation of raw steel accents, pristine glass windows and the exposed concrete that envelops each rectangular form. Materials were meticulously selected and combined to create a timeless piece.
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Designed by bagnoli, This renovation and addition transform a Victorian cottage into a light-filled showcase home for the Builder client. Distinct connections, materials, and forms separate major elements within the house while dissolving the additional mass externally to create an expansive and richly detailed experience.
Designed to use rich materials and distinct formal gestures to invert and highlight existing typologies this project evolved from a core concept of separation of elements.
Photography: Peter Bennetts
The original 1887 cottage was an important design element to be incorporated into the new home. Retaining as much of the original design as possible preserved some of the project’s history. The upper floor is designed to float above the original house. Internally glass walkways and externally timber cladding with vertical battens soften and dissolve the form. The cladding and large rear gum tree also act as shading devices and create shadow patterns from the natural light entering the house as the sun moves during the day. A large spiral staircase distinctly separates the new upstairs bedroom and bathroom spaces from the living zone.
Photography: Peter Bennetts
The rear of the property faces onto a playground reserve. A mirrored back fence was designed to acknowledge and allow the more public façade of the project to be interacted with. The mirrored surface visually extends the parkland and provides a playful feature for locals to enjoy. Embracing the public and existing context of this site was central to the design
Given the limited area available for the new home, the design needed to be compact and efficient with no ‘wasted’ spaces. The house provides ‘little sanctuaries’ within so the family can both be together and have their own zones. The family love the flow of the house and enjoy discovering new ways of seeing the space as the light and seasons changes and react to the timber and brass. Together with custom designed moments (including staircase plinth which doubles as a low seat for shoe changing, by the shoe cupboard) each space is designed for the inhabitants.
Photography: Peter Bennetts
Despite no heritage overlay in the area most of the houses have remained sympathetic to the original Victorian cottages lining the street. The dissolving nature of the addition’s spaced timber-batten façade and hip roof provides a sympathetic response to existing neighborhood conditions. At the rear, the staggered diamond shaped back fence posts allows the adjacent park into the garden while from the park the mirrored side of the post visually extends the open space beneath the floating upper story of the house.
A showcase home for a builder’s family, the briefly included means for Oreo, the dog, to have maximum yard space without running through the house and the rest of the family required a home that flowed, increased their living area and separated their sleeping zones. The clients wanted the house to have moments of joy, which are achieved by rich material and light interplays, both within the home and with the rear park interaction. And Oreo has passage under the glass-cantilevered floor along the side of the house – allowing him to run freely from front to back yard.
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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.
Photography: Ossip van Duivenbode
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.
Photography: Ossip van Duivenbode
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 meters to 450 square meters are mixed together, a diversity enabled by the building’s mountainous shape and the shifting floor plans that it generates.
Photography: Ossip van Duivenbode
“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 the 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 stories arranged around just 4 circulation cores.
Photography: Ossip van Duivenbode
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 colored 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).
Photography: Ossip van Duivenbode
The courtyards below are linked by four-story-high triangular gates, creating a 500-meter-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-meter lap pool only add a fraction to the overall cost.
While much of MVRDV’s approach focused on rethinking Indian housing, the design also recognizes 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.
Plan
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.
Photography: Ossip van Duivenbode
Project Info: Architects:MVRDV Location: Amanora Park Town, Hadapsar, Pune, Maharashtra, India Principal-in-charge: Jacob van Rijs Client: CCL Amanora Park Town Area: 140000.0 m2 Project Year: 2018 Photographs:Ossip van Duivenbode Project Name: Future Towers
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