has won a competition to design a new mixed-use residential and commercial complex on the edge of the Jiangbei New Area’s Financial District, Nanjing, China.

Called Oasis Towers, a pair of 150-metre-tall towers creates “a green haven among skyscrapers” for residents in a dense and rapidly developing part of the city.

Covering a total of 166,000 square meters, the mixed-use complex will incorporate residential and retail units, offering “curving, stratified cliffs” to emulate nature.

“The Chinese metropolis of Nanjing is growing rapidly,” said MVRDV. “To enable this growth, in 2015 the government formed the Jiangbei New Area, expanding Nanjing to the west across the Yangtze River.”

MVRDV nestles a green landscape between two 150-metre-tall towers. The project spans two adjacent blocks on the edge of the Jiangbei Financial District masterplan.

The project’s two L-shaped towers, each 40 storeys in height, face each other from the north and south corners. The complex is raised on the 3-4-storey podium that forms a perimeter that encloses almost the entire site to create the protective environment at its heart.

While this perimeter building bridges over pedestrian access routes and even the street between the two plots, it also creates a clear separation between the surrounding neighbourhood and the oasis at the centre of the design.

The complex incorporates trees and other greenery elements, the oasis forms a green landscape on the building’s cascading terraces, a lush environment for shopping in the building’s commercial floors from ground level up to the third floor.

“This park-like space has a number of functions: it provides cooling and biodiversity, the canopy offers privacy by shielding the residents of the upper floors from the shoppers below, and it creates a walkable environment that connects the two plots across the central road,” said MVRDV.

“At the very centre of the public space, the landscape steps down below ground level to connect beneath the road, providing a convenient crossing point and allowing access to the metro station beneath the site,” the office added.

“The contemporary architecture of Nanjing takes its inspiration from nature in form and appearance,” said MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas.

“With Oasis Towers we wanted to push this trend to the max – not only emulating nature with curving, stratified ‘cliffs’, but also to literally incorporate nature into the design with the greenery and by tapping into natural processes,” Maas added.

The design scheme will have a formal, gridded façade on its outer faces of the perimeter block to respond to the office skyscrapers that will emerge in its surroundings.