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In addition to its prowess in realizing sweeping  transformations, Rotterdam-based MVRDV is a specialist in large-scale urban housing projects that serve as bold landmarks in their respective cities, be it Bordeaux, Amsterdam, Madrid, or Pune, India.

Photo © Ossip van Duivenbode

In Eindhoven, the Netherland’s fifth-largest city, located in the southern province of North Brabant, MVRDV unites adaptive reuse and housing density with the newly completed Nieuw Bergen. Ten years in the making, the compact, nearly 340,000-square-foot redevelopment project encompasses five newly constructed buildings of different scales—several of them with jagged, slopping roofs that form a “mountainous silhouette”—and two older structures at the site that have been retained and renovated. Together, these old and new structures create 237 new units, ranging from social housing to studio apartments to luxury penthouses.

MVRDV, joined by local housing developer SDK Vastgoed (VolkerWessels), won the project in a 2017 competition seeking plans for a “progressive residential development.”

Photo © Ossip van Duivenbode

Like another housing project recently published by RECORD, the adaptive reuse of the Caserne Exelman barracks in Paris, the Nieuw Bergen scheme preserves and converts buildings that were previously associated with law enforcement. Specifically, the pair of existing buildings at Nieuw Bergen were rechristened as Vert and Jaune, were used as police stations that served Eindhoven’s historic, low-rise district of De Bergen at different points of time. Now, they are “connected by the recreated facade of a building that once filled the space in between–creating a colonnade-like structure that maintains the memory of the ensemble as it once was,” as described by MVRDV in a statement.

Photo © Ossip van Duivenbode

Photo © Ossip van Duivenbode

Behind these two resuscitated structures stands Nieuw Bergen’s assemblage of low-, mid- and high-rise apartment towers that give the project its quasi-alpine appearance. Gradually rising in scale, the new buildings include Orange, a six-story structure that contains most of the development’s social housing apartments and Indigo, a 17-story tower defined by its inclined roof clad in greenery. In addition to the difference in scale, the transition as one moves through the development is marked by a gradient of facade colors. Moving from the dark red-brick of the two former police stations, the new buildings become lighter: brown, beige, light gray, and finally, the white-stone facade of Indigo.

Photos © Ossip van Duivenbode

Several of the buildings, including Indigo, Vert, and Jaune, include ground-level commercial storefronts complemented by streetside dining and drinking terraces. The peaks of three of the taller buildings feature open roof terraces, with glass parapets serving as windbreaks. One of them, Bleu, has a glass-encased community garden on its roof. Helmed by MTD Landschapsarchitecten, the lush landscaping found throughout Nieuw Bergen, from the newly pedestrian-oriented streets to the sloping roofs, bolsters biodiversity, mitigates heat, and provides rainwater retention.

“To turn this site from a cluster of municipal buildings and parking lots into a place to live and stay, with activity throughout the day, we wanted buildings with character, embedded into the neighborhood in a way that feels natural,” says MVRDV founding partner Jacob van Rijs. “The sloping roofs achieve this in a way that benefits both residents in their apartments and visitors in the streets. The result is a chain of polite, yet simultaneously radical buildings.”

Photo © Ossip van Duivenbode

Images courtesy MVRDV, click to enlarge