Dutch firm MVRDV recently completed its first project in India. Titled Future Towers, the ‘vertical village’ features 1068 apartments and will house a diverse populous of the rapidly expanding middle class in Pune. The innovative, mountainous shape of the structure enables it to host a variety of apartments, ranging from 45 to 450 square meters, and the hexagonal grid created by this facade leaves large open courtyards at the ground level.
Another interesting design element is a mixture of normal size, double-height, double-width and even some L-shaped balconies. The strong graphical appearance created 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).
“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.”
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.
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.
