Nieuw Bergen by MVRDV inserts a dense residential ensemble into Eindhoven’s De Bergen district through seven buildings that combine adaptive reuse, stepped massing, angled roof geometries, and planted communal surfaces. The project accommodates 237 dwellings with retail and hospitality spaces, while balancing the low-rise masonry character of the historic neighborhood with the increased scale required by inner-city housing demand.
Nieuw Bergen Technical Information
- ArchitectsMVRDV
- LocationEindhoven, Netherlands
- Gross Area31,246 m2 | 336,329 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2016 – 2026
- Photographs© Ossip van Duivenbode
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 neighbourhood in a way that feels natural.
– Jacob van Rijs
Urban Density Within the Historic Fabric
Nieuw Bergen occupies a charged position in De Bergen, one of Eindhoven’s older low-rise districts, where compact streets, brick buildings, small shops, and restaurants form a finer-grained urban texture than much of the surrounding city. The project replaces a loose collection of municipal buildings and parking areas with 237 dwellings, retail units, and hospitality spaces, shifting the site from residual infrastructure toward a more continuous residential quarter. Its relevance lies less in the number of homes alone than in the way density is distributed across a fragmentary urban block.
The ensemble is composed of seven buildings: five new structures and two transformed twentieth-century brick buildings that formerly served as police stations. Rather than treating the site as a single block or tower plot, the design breaks the program into distinct volumes named Indigo, Violet, Bleu, Rouge, Orange, Jaune, and Vert. This division allows the development to absorb a large program while maintaining legible passages, courtyards, and street edges. It also avoids the monolithic presence often associated with inner-city densification.
The transition in height is central to the urban strategy. Orange, the six-story block containing social housing, sits within the lower range of the composition, while Indigo rises to 17 stories at the opposite end. Between these points, the buildings step upward and away from the historic fabric, producing a graduated section rather than an abrupt contrast. The strategy does not erase the tension between old neighborhood scale and new urban demand, but it makes that tension spatially readable through proportion, distance, and sequence.
Massing, Sunlight, and the Mountain Profile
The project’s sloping roofs are generated by a daylight rule: roof planes are cut along a 45-degree angle from the base of neighboring structures. This method limits overshadowing on adjacent buildings, courtyards, and streets, turning solar access into a formal constraint. In plan and section, the rule produces irregular peaks and angled surfaces that respond to the surrounding block rather than to a purely sculptural ambition. The result is a roofscape shaped by environmental negotiation as much as by urban image.
The jagged profile gives Nieuw Bergen a collective silhouette, but it does not depend on a single object building. Instead, the image emerges from the repetition and variation of inclined planes across the ensemble. From aerial views, the roofscape reads as a patchwork of planted surfaces, photovoltaic panels, skylights, terraces, and glazed structures. This distribution of elements is significant: environmental devices are not hidden as technical equipment, but incorporated into the visible anatomy of the project.
Inside the upper dwellings, the roof geometry becomes spatially consequential. Penthouse interiors have steeply sloped ceilings, double-height rooms, angled skylights, pentagonal windows, and diagonal shafts of light that register the sectional logic of the building envelope. These spaces offer framed views across Eindhoven while exposing the compromises inherent in inhabiting a formally driven roofscape. The sloped planes create spatial character, but they also demand careful planning at the intersection of wall heights, furniture placement, thermal control, and daylight intensity.
Material Gradients and Adaptive Reuse
The two retained brick buildings, Vert and Jaune, perform an important urban role by preserving scale, material memory, and continuity along Grote Berg. Their dark red-brown masonry, mansard roofs, and dormers anchor the project in the older fabric of De Bergen. The transformation does not simply preserve isolated facades as visual evidence of the past. It keeps recognizable volumes within the composition, allowing the new development to begin from existing urban matter rather than from a cleared site.
Between the two historic structures, a recreated cream-colored colonnade facade with blue diamond tiles reintroduces the memory of a building that once completed the ensemble. This element is neither a neutral infill nor a straightforward reconstruction. Its slender openings, ceramic-like surface, and patterned grid create a distinct architectural layer that acknowledges loss while resisting seamless historic imitation. The facade acts as a hinge, linking existing fragments and marking the threshold between preservation, reconstruction, and new urban composition.
The broader material strategy extends this mediation through a facade gradient. Dark brick gives way to brown, beige, grey, and finally to the white stone cladding of the taller volumes. This chromatic shift offers a visual transition from the masonry weight of the old neighborhood to the lighter, more abstract expression of the tower forms. At its strongest, the gradient clarifies the project’s urban section. At its most vulnerable, it risks turning contextual response into a graphic device, especially where color change becomes more legible than tectonic depth.
Shared Landscapes, Roof Ecologies, and Everyday Public Life
At ground level, Nieuw Bergen reorganizes the block through semi-public courtyards, narrow passages, planted beds, playgrounds, and largely car-free spaces. These elements increase permeability and encourage movement across the site rather than around it. Brick paving, young trees, living walls, glazed bases, and built-in planters combine to soften the density of the block, though their long-term success will depend on maintenance, programming, and the degree to which residents and visitors share these spaces without conflict.
The roofs extend this landscape strategy upward. Green roofs contribute to rainwater retention, heat mitigation, and biodiversity, while photovoltaic panels occupy the inclined surfaces shaped by the daylight logic. Communal terraces on the roof peaks introduce shared outdoor rooms above the street, protected by glass parapets that function as windbreaks. On Bleu, a rooftop greenhouse provides a more enclosed setting for collective gardening and informal gathering, turning the environmental roof into a social surface rather than a purely technical layer.
As a model for compact inner-city housing, the project is most instructive in the way it links density with sectional design. Sunlight access, planted roofs, shared amenities, adaptive reuse, and street-level permeability are treated as interdependent architectural problems. Nieuw Bergen does not resolve the broader pressures of urban densification, including affordability, governance of shared areas, and the transformation of historic districts under redevelopment. It does, however, demonstrate how a dense residential project can use massing, material transition, and ecological surfaces to negotiate between neighborhood continuity and metropolitan growth.
About MVRDV
Based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, MVRDV was founded in 1993 by Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, and Nathalie de Vries. The studio works globally across architecture, urbanism, and research, developing buildings, urban plans, and design strategies that address contemporary architectural and urban issues through density, sustainability, and social value.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: Adviesbureau Tielemans
- MEP consultants: Huisman & van Muijen
- Landscape designers: MTD Landschapsarchitecten
- Client: SDK Vastgoed bv (VolkerWessels)
- Construction company: Stam + De Koning Bouw
- Building Physics: DPA Cauberg-Huygen;
- Technical design: INBO
- Interior lobbies: Fokke Moerel
- Photographer: Ossip van Duivenbode
The De Bergen District in a adaptive city. They should use the HUD vouchers through the chamber of commerce for low-income rentals.
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