Designing a nature positive residential building in the Netherlands

From meadows to larger scale interventions, cities everywhere are looking for nature positive initiatives to mitigate biodiversity loss and become more resilient – although embedding biodiversity into the fabric of a building remains a complex undertaking. How do you design a biodiversity positive residential building at the heart of a bustling European city?

The Amsterdam Green Infrastructure Vision 2050 is targeting a liveable city for people, plants and animals. In line with this vision, the Municipality issued a competition for the design of a 15,000m² residential building tuned to its green surroundings.

Real estate developer KondorWessels Vastgoed and architect Mecanoo, in collaboration with Arup, BOOM Landscape and Tenderboost created the winning building design and named it Habitat Royale, a biodiversity-positive residential building which will help nature to bloom in the city.

Standing next to Amsterdam’s Zuidas business district, the building takes the first steps towards creating a nature corridor connecting the site with the green open spaces of Beatrixpark.

Housing 94 apartments, the nature-first building design will create microhabitats, doubling the amount of biodiversity on site. The nature weaved into the fabric of the building and the use of sustainable materials like timber will act as a ‘carbon sink’, allowing for the capture of CO2 emissions out of the atmosphere.

As well as leading on the sustainability consultancy, Arup is responsible for structural engineering, drawing on our previous experience designing high performance buildings like Milan’s Bosco Verticale, Haut and Elements.