The apparent deterioration of our urban environment led us to reevaluate the nature of our designed habitats, habitats in which living in a high-rise is almost always accompanied by a loss of neighborhood and alienation from the ground and from nature.

Our design philosophy addresses these shortcomings by invoking Samyama-or balance between the many different ingredients of healthy and aspirational lifestyles. This philosophy guides all aspects of the complex to achieve Samyama between tradition and innovation, nature and culture, permanence and transience, water and ground, light and shade, work and play, community and individuality, public and private, vehicular and pedestrian.

Vernacular habitats have evolved around a network of community spaces generally translated through a hierarchy of courtyards transitioning from the central square through to the public / private “otla”.

The sense of place, community and identity fostered by these archetypes has been subverted by the proliferation of stacked floor plates leaving little room for the informal public realm.

The extension of the street and garden into the high rise towers is the guiding principle behind the development of the building form.

A central core is flanked by modular 5 storey blocks on 2 sides that change orientation every 5 floors. The resultant voids provide shared community spaces for every 10 apartments to be appropriated by the inhabitants. These voids also notionally break down the scale of a 165.0m tower to 15.0m modules that impact the corporeal experience of the end users and mitigate the sense of estrangement from the ground.