Design for Living: Amsterdam’s crumbling modern masterpiece

Aerial view of Valley apartments in Amsterdam: unique sun and views for everyone.

There’s a golden rule in residential construction: the more you can standardise the unit designs, the cheaper the whole project will be. But what if you just don’t want uniformity? How do you build a couple of hundred apartments, each with a unique floor plan and unique outlook, plus a whole lot of offices, shops and public spaces, and still keep some semblance of control on costs?

Call in the computers, that’s how.

Valley 4

Valley is a three-tower complex in Zuidas, the business district of Amsterdam. It’s 100 metres tall at its highest point, designed to be planted all over, and looks like nothing so much as an enormous glass-walled city block that’s had the middle torn from it – possibly by King Kong, or some even bigger monster.

The result: eight floors of offices, with another 19 floors of densely packed homes on top, all enjoying sun, views, balconies and a really splendid dose of imaginative fancy. Car parks occupy three more floors underground. Valley won the 2021 Emporis Award for the world’s best new skyscraper and was officially opened last year.

The apartments look like an irregular rockface, with wide sets of external stairs leading visitors up to a seventh-floor plateau, where a “green valley” winds its way among the three buildings. There are water features and 370 planted areas, featuring 13,500 shrubs and trees that, as they grow, will transform the appearance of the complex. Cafes, restaurants, public meeting spaces, cultural venues and a “sky bar” at the top all entice the public in: you don’t have to live or work there to explore and enjoy.

A city facade, with nature thriving within: not just the people and the plants, not just the birds and bees they’re intended to attract, but the very sense that the apartments are hewn from rock. There’s an atrium at ground level with shops and other outlets, including the Sapiens Lab: an incubator laboratory for young scientists.

Density, privacy, greenery: Valley apartments in Amsterdam.

Developer Coen van Oostrom asks, “If we could do cities all over again, how would we shape them?” Architect Winy Maas, of the firm MVRDV, calls Valley “the future of cities”. He would say that, but he does mean it: MVRDV have buildings inspired by the same thinking under construction in China, Ecuador and Albania. The irregularity of the Albanian one doesn’t evoke something crumbling; instead, it’s intended to resemble, semi-abstractly, the bust of a 15th century national hero.

Software specially designed for Valley allowed them to design each apartment to receive sun and views, and to cover the walls with 40,000 stone tiles of different sizes in a pattern that is “apparently random”. Internally, the apartments’ unique floorplans are also “apparently random”. In reality, there’s a modular approach.

And over the road, there are waterways and a park with playing fields. Cities, whether old or new, need those things too.

Follow the game or just chill: inner-city living in Amsterdam.

Mirror glass to the world, a crumbling geology of apartments inside: the Valley complex in Amsterdam.

Simon Wilson is a senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.

Design for Living appears most weeks in Canvas magazine.