The Red Apple is a residential complex with shops, cafés, restaurants and business spaces that towers skyward at the head of Rotterdam’s Wijnhaven Island (“Wine Harbor” Island). Wijnhaven Island forms a link between Rotterdam city center and the River Maas. It is being redeveloped using a dynamic transformation model, which provides development guidelines that ensure a balance between new and existing construction, as well as the preservation of views and sufficient incidence of daylight throughout the area.

The Red Apple building stands in a visually prominent position at the tip of Wijnhaven Island, with water on three sides and views across the river and the Oude Haven (“Old Harbor”). The Red Apple is a highly varied architectural mass where the existing block structure and integrates a number of the old office buildings into the new structure, in line with the stipulations of the dynamic transformation model.

The southwest corner of the site is occupied by a slender tower. The ground-floor entrance is a spacious glazed lobby. On the immediate floors above there are live/work loft spaces, while above the 21 meter (69ft) level there are apartments of various sizes, all diagonally oriented providing for optimal views.

The converging lines of Wijnhaven Island meet at The Red Apple, outlining a five-sided volume, part of which cantilevers beyond the substructure. In this block building, apartments of various size are grouped around a central atrium, offering orientation for the circulation routes internally. Due to large apertures in the façade, this atrium also offers a stunning vista across the city.

For both volumes, the tower and the cantilevered block, the panoramic views call for a maximum use of glass in the façade. Floor-to-ceiling solar glass between red bands of anodized aluminum characterize the façade and accentuate the building in the skyline from afar. The tower reveals the red bands as vertical lines which decrease in width towards the top to support its slender appearance. The block building is defined by horizontal layers. The red bands are formed by aluminum panels which gain their color through anodizing with no other color treatment. In the tower, they contain the load bearing structure of the façade and adapt in width to the increasing mass towards ground level.