Tour & Taxis Towers by MVRDV introduces a mixed-use high-rise ensemble to the Brussels redevelopment area through two unequal towers and a five-story plinth that combines offices, housing, public circulation, and shared amenities. Rather than approaching density as a singular vertical object, the project organizes height, program, and environmental performance through a modular system, stepped massing, and a public ground condition that connects the site to the wider Lake Side masterplan.
Tour & Taxis Towers Technical Information
- ArchitectsMVRDV
- LocationBrussels, Belgium
- Gross Area58,400 m2 | 628,612 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2021 – Ongoing
- Visualizations© Reverso Studio
We continue to pursue high-value, dense, mixed-use neighbourhoods that allow for future flexibility, while expanding the definition of responsible density to include the carbon emissions of new tall buildings.
– Nathalie de Vries
Urban Position and Mixed Use Density
The project occupies a hinge condition within the Tour & Taxis redevelopment, where residential blocks and office buildings meet at different scales and rhythms. Its response is not to smooth over these differences, but to formalize them through a paired composition: a 20-story office tower to the west and a 35-story residential tower to the east. This split massing distributes density according to use, while avoiding the singular autonomy often associated with large mixed-use towers.
The five-story plinth is central to this urban reading. It binds the two towers into a single architectural system, yet it also works as a horizontal field of exchange that hosts offices, public functions, circulation, and a roof terrace. By thickening the base rather than merely filling the footprint, the building establishes a continuous street edge and gives the ensemble a civic scale at ground level.
A public passage cuts through the plinth from Anna Bochlaan to the Lakeside area, positioning the project as part of a broader network of pedestrian movement. This decision matters architecturally because it resists the sealed podium model common in commercial redevelopment. The building becomes traversable, and its internal organization participates in the neighborhood rather than retreating from it.
Massing, Modularity, and Architectural Expression
The towers are organized through a 2.7-meter facade module that coordinates structure, envelope, and internal planning. This modular discipline gives the project a legible order across multiple scales, from the repetition of facade bays to the variation of apartment types and office layouts. It also establishes a framework for future adaptation, suggesting that the building has been conceived less as a fixed object than as a system capable of accommodating change over time.
Within this order, the massing is deliberately disturbed by irregular setbacks that carve terraces into both towers. These cuts do more than diversify the skyline. They produce corner conditions, outdoor rooms, and changes in depth that reduce the apparent bulk of the volumes when seen from the street or from a distance across Brussels. The stepped silhouette, therefore, works simultaneously as an urban calibration, a housing amenity strategy, and a means of breaking down the scale of tall building form.
The facade reads as a deep, gridded frame of pale, concrete- or stone-toned precast elements, with recessed glazing set behind it. Close views reveal beveled openings, darker infill, and timber-framed windows recessed within the structural depth. Across the office tower, residential tower, and plinth, this repeated tectonic language produces visual continuity without erasing programmatic difference. The building avoids expressive fragmentation, relying instead on modulation, depth, and repetition to achieve formal coherence.
Structure, Carbon Strategy, and Environmental Logic
Embodied carbon reduction is treated here as an organizing design force rather than a technical afterthought. The office tower uses a hybrid structural system in which a concrete frame supports cross-laminated timber floor slabs, reducing overall weight and limiting the amount of concrete required in both the superstructure and the foundations. This is significant in the context of tall buildings, where structural demands often lock projects into highly carbon-intensive construction logics from the outset.
The project extends this strategy through coordination between the structural grid, facade module, and envelope weight. Lighter facade elements and an efficient dimensional system contribute to lower loads, while the diagrams suggest that carbon accounting-informed design decisions were made before the final expression was resolved. In this sense, sustainability is not represented by added devices, but by the alignment of geometry, material choice, and building performance.
Environmental logic also shapes the visible architecture. The distribution of glazing and opaque infill varies by orientation, with more open facades on cooler exposures and more solid surfaces on warmer exposures. The setbacks likewise emerge from light and wind studies, so their placement is climatically informed rather than arbitrary. What appears as sculptural variation is therefore tied to a broader environmental calibration, linking form to exposure, comfort, and energy demand.
Public Interior, Collective Space, and Everyday Use
The plinth acts as the project’s social and spatial condenser. Its five levels gather shared urban functions into a porous base condition, including workplaces, public amenities, circulation routes, and a central atrium. Instead of separating these functions into isolated access systems, the building layers them around a common interior volume, making the lower part of the complex more publicly legible and continuously occupied.
Renderings of the atrium and office lobby emphasize the relationship between structure and collective use. Exposed concrete columns and beams are paired with timber slabs and slatted timber ceilings, producing an interior language that makes the hybrid construction visible. Walkways, glazed meeting rooms, and overlooking circulation animate the atrium as a vertical room rather than a neutral void. Movement through the building is therefore staged as a spatial experience, one in which interior activity can be glimpsed from the passage and from other levels within the plinth.
Outdoor space is distributed across the project as an everyday extension of interior life. The plinth roof terrace, private residential setbacks, and shared upper terraces offer different scales of occupation, ranging from informal gatherings to planted retreats. In a dense mixed-use development, these spaces are not incidental amenities. They are part of the architectural argument for vertical living and working, providing access to air, planting, and collective presence beyond the enclosed floor plate.
About MVRDV
MVRDV is a globally operating architecture and urbanism practice based in Rotterdam, founded in 1993 by Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, and Nathalie de Vries. The studio works through a research-led approach spanning architecture, urban design, masterplans, public space, and policy, with Tour and Taxis Towers forming part of its Lake Side masterplan in Brussels.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Plans: Image credit: MVRDV
- Structural engineers: Ney and Partners
- MEP consultants: CES
- Client: Nextensa
- Construction company: MBG + CIT Blaton
- Co-architect and project coordination: Bureau Bouwtechniek
- Building Physics: CES
- Environmental advisor: Encon
- Acoustical engineering: Bureau De Fonseca
- Safety coordinator: Bopro
- Visualizations: Reverso Studio
- CarbonSpace proprietary software by MVRDV
- Press materials: nextensa.eu / lakeside.brussels
