MVRDV's angular Valley skyscraper opens in Amsterdam

[Celerity]

https://www.dezeen.com/2022/09/20/valley-skyscraper-mvrdv-open-amsterdam/





A mountain-like angular skyscraper with jagged peaks named Valley, which was designed by Dutch studio MVRDV, has officially opened in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The 75,000-square-meter development in Amsterdam's Zuidas district was designed for real estate developer EDGE and contains 200 apartments along with offices and restaurants.



The 100-metre-high building was designed as a "symphony of life", according to MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas. "How do you make an office district liveable?" Maas said. "What should the homes be like? What else is needed? Those were the questions we started with when we designed Valley."



"Instead of a one-note business centre, this site along Beethovenstraat in Amsterdam is now a symphony of life – people working, yes, but also barbecuing on their terraces, visitors relaxing in the valley, shopping in the grotto, eating dinner by the street, and even the window cleaners and the gardeners scaling the heights above," he added. "Valley is a first step towards transforming this part of Amsterdam into a greener, denser, and more human city."



The high-rise is composed of three connected towers of different heights that rise from a podium structure. Each of the towers has a largerly glazed facade and a contrasting facade containing a multitude of terraces and balconies that overlap one another. Custom digital tools were used to make sure each apartment had enough light while creating a seemingly random pattern from the balconies, which were clad in 40,000 stone tiles.



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[MLAA]

1. Beautiful.

[Phoenix61]

2. That is very cool! Check out the outside staircase. nt

[localroger]

5. It's like a hiking trail /nt

[William Seger]

9. ... with mountain switchbacks (nt)

[Brother Buzz]

3. It doesn't float my boat - To busy

I appreciate outside the box architecture, but it should be graceful and aesthetically pleasing. Just my opinion.

[localroger]

4. It's meant to be like life

Living things have no straight lines. The building obviously has to have them at the level of residences which need to be habitable, but it scatters them around level to level in the way life does to the elements of a mountain. They put a lot of effort into making sure all of the residences had light and terraces. But no two of them are the same. If you live there, nobody else has an apartment just like yours. I would find that an elegant solution to the problem of finding uniqueness in a densely populated city.

[Brother Buzz]

6. I understand what you're saying, but I might have suggested ..

injecting some graceful curves in with all those straight lines would soften things. Just so you know, I've been called an aesthetic fart.

[First Speaker]

7. It looks like something Howard Rourke would have built in *The Fountainhead*...

...and I actually mean that as a compliment. The novel is the only good thing Ayn Rand ever wrote, and the movie is a gas. It's utterly unreal, and utterly fascinating...

[electric_blue68]

8. Oh, I like this! Ty! ....

I really love that they computed how much light each apt got. That they have areas that are planted. 🧡

That's a wild staircase. Yeah, as posted above "a hiking trail". 👍

It does remind me of mountains, and crystals.