OMA designs sustainable City Hall in Rotterdam

Office for Metropolitan Architecture worked with Werner Sobek and engineers ABT and won a competition to design a new mixed used building at Rotterdam’s City Hall in the Netherlands.
Set for completion in 2014, the innovative and sustainable scheme for the city council includes municipal services, offices and residential units.
The new building will be made up of smaller box-shaped cells to generate maximum efficiency and versatility in construction and features a modular structure with repeated units gradually set back from the street as they rise into two irregular peaks. Units can be added or taken away as needed.
Besides this particular structure, the building has a climate regulated by warm air stored in summer and released in winter, and vice versa, and the use of hi-tech translucent insulation in the building’s glass façade, addressing the main requirement for this building: to be the most sustainable building in the Netherlands.
The highly insulated glazed building will also include green terraces for residential occupants on higher levels providing the possibility of an apartment with a garden in the heart of urban Rotterdam!
OMA partner Reinier de Graaf said: “Rather than posing as the city’s next superlative, the design for the Stadskantoor is partly a building, partly an urban condition – a skyline in its own right.”

More OMA in Future Architecture here