MVRDV has released details of their master plan for Tour & Taxis Lake Side in Brussels, Belgium. The master plan consists of 17 buildings designed by seven different architects including MVRDV, adding 800 residential units to the area.

The master plan is split into three sections. A mixed office and housing campus to the east contains large-scale buildings, including cross-laminated timber and lightweight hybrid structures. The middle section, meanwhile, sees 14 individual buildings clustered around a public garden. The ground floors of the buildings contain public amenities and shops, while all 14 buildings hold either green or energy-producing roofs. The third section of the master plan blends the dense neighborhood into the adjacent Tour & Taxis Park, with a more open space punctuated by a tower known as the Park Building.

The plan contains a range of housing types, including two buildings providing co-living apartments. The master plan also holds workspaces, retail, and leisure, as well as publicly accessible open and green spaces. To achieve a non-uniform, humane, locally recognizable, and historically appropriate quality to the architecture, MVRDV created a framework of spatial and qualitative rules to specify features such as building size, façade composition, and materials, with brick being the prevailing material across the plan.

Other firms involved in the scheme’s development include Bureau Bouwtechniek, 3XN, Cobe, Effekt Arkitekter, Binst Architects, Polo, and Hub. Meanwhile, three landscape typologies have been developed by Bureau Bas Smets to complement the master plan’s three sections. A forest winds its way among the buildings of the eastern zone, while small hills create “intimate communal spaces” within the courtyard. On the westernmost section of the plan, a valley transitions into the Tour & Taxis Park, surrounding the Park Building tower.

“Our master plan comprises a collection of varying building profiles and heights that step up to a denser, more lively neighborhood, while also maintaining views and a high proportion of green space,” said MVRDV founding partner Nathalie de Vries about the scheme. “The plan provides much-needed diverse housing, designed by a group of excellent architects. In combination with existing as well as new working places, this project helps Tour & Taxis to finalize its grand project to add a unique, mixed-use new neighborhood to the city.”

News of the project comes one week after MVRDV completed their transformation of a communist-era Tirana Pyramid monument in Albania. Earlier this month, the firm completed a retrofit of a 1990s Shenzhen tower, while in September, the firm completed a high school renovation project in the Netherlands alongside Van Boven Architecten.