برج مطلق

Absolute Towers
by MAD

inShare0

Chinese firm MAD has completed a pair of curvaceous twisted skyscrapers in the growing city of Mississauga, Canada (+ slideshow).

Standing at 170 and 150 metres, the Absolute Towers contain apartments on each of their oval-shaped floors, but every storey is incrementally rotated to give both buildings a curved and twisted outline.

“The concept of the tower at the beginning was very simple,” said MAD founder Ma Yansong. “We just wanted to make something organic but different, more natural and more soft and not something too strong that would remind people of money or power.”

Mississauga first developed as a suburb of Toronto but has grown in recent decades and was named as a city in 1974. Since then, high-rise developments have sprung up across the city and the architects were keen to avoid designing another of these “listless, boxy buildings”.

“Lots of cities like this are happening in China, just repeating the modern urban typology and always making square towers,” added Yansong. “We were thinking; how about reversing that? “So we don’t treat architecture as a product, or an artificial volume or space. It’s more like a landscape.”

MAD won a competition to design the buildings in 2006, which were initially dubbed “the Marylyn Monroe towers” by local residents in reference to their shapely bodies.

Apartments in both towers boast panoramic views of the city skyline from continuous balconies that wrap around the recessed glass facades. This set-back also helps to shade each apartment from direct sunlight in the summer months.

MAD also recently unveiled plans for a village of towering apartment blocks beside the Huangshan Mountains in China.

See more architecture by MAD, including a museum the firm completed last year in the desert city Ordos.

Above: site plan – click above for larger image

Photography is by Iwan Baan.

Above: typical floor plan – click above for larger image

Here’s a project description from MAD: