Mecanoo is moving ahead with a 28-story tower in north Amsterdam. The mixed-use residential and commercial tower, whose inception we covered in 2020, has been formally approved by city officials and will now move forward to construction later this month. Completion is expected in 2025.

Named the Brink Tower after the Dutch word for open green space, the scheme is imagined as a ‘visual and social link’ between two existing residential neighborhoods in north Amsterdam.

The concept is defined by its rounded corners along the entirety of its 90-meter (295-foot) height. Clad in a warm red brick to reference the influential Amsterdam School of the 1920s, the tower’s 28 stories are interspersed on the façade by brick and concrete bands. Between the bands, each level benefits from full-height glazing broken by slender brick elements.

When viewed from the north, the tower adopts a wide, robust form in response to neighboring towers in Amsterdam’s docklands. From the south, where the scheme addresses a low-rise residential neighborhood, the design is broken into a series of rounded cascading volumes, each with collective roof terraces and gardens.

Inside, the tower holds a commercial plinth at the lower levels, with residential above. The development’s 406 apartments comprise 266 rental homes and 120 affordable rental homes, supported by a residential care facility, built-in community facilities, a community center, and commercial facilities including a café and restaurant.

“The Brink Tower is designed to become an energy-positive residential tower and generates more energy than it consumes, thanks to photovoltaics on terraces and facades, wind and more solar energy harvesting on the top roof, and various energy-saving measures including an aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) system,” Mecanoo adds.

News of Brink Tower comes shortly after a series of award successes for Mecanoo. In September, the Dutch firm was awarded a 2022 Modernism in America Award by Docomomo US for their modernization of the Mies van der Rohe-designed Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington D.C. In August, the firm's work was included in 150 winning projects for the International Architecture Awards by The Chicago Athenaeum.

Last year, meanwhile, we covered the Mecanoo’s conversion of a former urban railway line into a green corridor in Taiwan.