As team leader of a leading residential development company based in Johannesburg, South Africa, Laurence Grigorov keeps abreast of international development and design projects in order to ensure that the projects the company is involved in are current and relevant. Laurence Grigorov has been director since the company’s inception in 2003.

Taiwan's Times Square: MVRDV's Taipei Twin Towers Is an Ambitious Proposal to Intensify the Capital City's Central Station Area

MVRDV’s bold and ambitious design for the Taipei Twin Towers, designed as part of a consortium lead by Nan Hai Development, has been selected to revitalise the central station area of Taipei. The design of the Taipei Twin Towers is characterised by a pile of blocks that create a vertical urban neighbourhood, and by the façades of those boxes – including a number of interactive media façades – that artistically communicate the diverse program contained by those blocks. The aim of the project is to provide a vibrant and charismatic destination that re-establishes the central station area of Taipei as the city’s premier location for shopping, working, and tourism—a Times Square for Taiwan.

The site of the Taipei Twin Towers project is currently occupied by the city’s Main Station, which serves both the city’s railway, airport lines, and metro networks, and a number of underused parks and plazas. The new buildings will be built over the top of the existing station, combining retail, offices, two cinemas, and two hotels; meanwhile the plazas will be unified and redeveloped.

The neighbourhood surrounding the building includes a mixture of small, human-scale buildings and larger towers. MVRDV’s proposal combines these two contextual scales. When experienced from up-close, the main visual impact of the buildings will be provided by the bases of the towers, comprising connected stacks of small blocks housing retail, with each proposed to house different retail outlets and thus contain different identities. Above, larger blocks complete two towers of 337 and 280 meters, providing the dominant impression of the buildings when seen from afar. These larger blocks house the offices, cinemas, and two hotels: one targeted at young, trendy travellers crowning the East tower and the other focusing on the luxury market crowning the West tower.

This vertical village approach continues MVRDV’s investigation into the future of high-rise buildings. Whereas traditional skyscraper typologies create a separation between the ground-level public realm and the elevated and isolated world of the building’s interior, the Taipei Twin Towers will allow these two conditions to intertwine. By extending exterior pedestrian routes over the bottom 20 floors of the building, the public realm of the city is expanded into three dimensions, while the interior life of the tower is allowed to spread out into its surroundings.

Laurence Grigorov is highly influenced by modern design and development trends and endeavours to instil these inspirations in the company’s projects.

Words and images courtesy of www.architectmagazine.com