V8 Architects completes Cooltoren. An ode to the skyline and buildings of Rotterdam
ROTTERDAM, 11 JANUARY 2023, V8 Architects has completed their first skyscraper. The new building is located in the city centre of Rotterdam, standing among the relics of Rotterdam’s post-war modernism streetscape.
The 50-story tower is an ode to the skyline and building scales of the city: The ‘Rotterdam layer’ of up to 30 meters and the widely used building height of 70 meters. The tower comprises 282 apartments and includes an above-ground car park, spacious bicycle storage with a mural by Luuk Bode and a 1770m2 communal green roof garden.
V8 Architects was appointed in 2016 by De Vijf Heeren to design a 150-metre-high residential tower with a striking and functionally relevant silhouette that would speed up the development potential of this location before new, stricter building regulations would take effect in 2017. An intensive collaboration led to the right balance between construction, form factor and residential joy. Every centimetre counts on the cost and revenue sides, resulting in a functional and technical puzzle on the cutting edge.
The Cooltoren celebrates the city, its context and the postwar architecture previously on this site. The horizontal stacking of the 52 residential floors progresses from airy on the street to heavy in the middle and ends airy again in the clouds. The gradual thickening of the balconies and the use of panoramic windows achieves this. The special middle section forms the tower’s centre of gravity and is called the central crown. This element defines the silhouette and, as the equivalent of the penthouses, offers four floors of four fantastic corner flats, each with a 72 m2 balcony.
The Cooltoren is expected to be fully occupied later this year.