THE BIORISE - A Modular Vision for Living Cities
Client: Real Developments
Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Status: R&D
The Top Up City - Biophilic stacking as a spatial answer to the housing shortage
How do we create healthy, nature-connected places when space at ground level is no longer available? The Top Up City explores a spatial and material answer to that question by extending the city not outward, but upward, not through high-rise isolation, but through layered biophilic integration.
This research-driven visual project by Studio NousNous builds upon the existing city fabric: a traditional brick building becomes the base layer for a dynamic, wooden upper city. The architecture rises not in symmetry or monotony, but through organic, tree-like branching, wooden volumes at varying heights, interlinked with bridges, courtyards, and green walkways.
The result is a new urban typology: a stacked biophilic neighbourhood that reimagines underused rooftops as fertile terrain for life, light, housing, and biodiversity.
A vision shaped by seven years of research
The Top Up City is part of a long-term exploration by Studio NousNous founder Hakim into future urban landscapes. Over the last seven years, the studio has investigated how cities can be designed not only with structural strength, but with ecological intelligence and emotional resonance. This project sits at the intersection of urbanism, architecture, and design research, drawing from biomimicry, AI-aided form studies, and public realm psychology.
Where many visions of the future lean on a linear proces and the same building materials, Top Up City - The BioRise is built in wood, biobased, warm, and fundamentally human. It addresses a key issue in spatial development: how to create affordable, healthy housing in already dense urban cores, while improving the city’s ecological and social systems.
From cars to connection
The design does not stop at rooftop level. Below, the existing asphalt road is transformed into a car-free biophilic lane. Bike paths, walking zones, soft surfaces, water features, and greenery replace traffic infrastructure. This “slow mobility street” not only improves air quality and mental well-being, it also reconnects the ground level with the upper city in both use and atmosphere.
Trees begin to grow along the façade. Ivy climbs the old brick. Rainwater is reflected on the path and absorbed by planted zones. In this reimagined street, architecture and ecology coexist seamlessly.
Building upward, not just higher
The design proposes a city that branches, much like a forest canopy. Wooden dwellings, shaded terraces, public bridges and rooftop parks are spatially layered in a way that preserves human scale and spatial variation.
These stacked volumes are not isolated penthouses. They are connected living spaces for all, potentially including social housing, interwoven with communal areas that invite movement, conversation, and encounter. A new type of density emerges: healthy, inclusive, and grounded in nature.
A new spatial language
The project also explores how AI-generated structures, based on vast data and optimized forms, often struggle to align with intuitive, emotionally resonant design. The Top Up City argues for a future in which human designers and machine logic meet, where the invisible qualities of a place, such as atmosphere and memory, remain central.
This urban vision isn’t a utopia. It is a spatial scenario rooted in material reality and social urgency:
Wood instead of concrete
Green instead of grey
Public connection instead of vertical isolation
Life layered, not divided
From vision to potential
The Top Up City offers a lens into how cities can evolve when we rethink the direction of growth. With biobased materials, emotional spatial logic, and integration of mobility, biodiversity, and housing, we can transform forgotten rooftops and asphalt roads into places for people and nature.
Alongside this spatial research, Studio NousNous founder Hakim El Amrani has been working for years on large-scale hand-drawn and mixed media illustrations of The Top Up City. This evolving artworks adds a personal, imaginative layer to the project, one that captures not only what a city could look like, but how it might feel. From floating walkways and clustered wood dwellings to overgrown balconies and rooftop forests, the drawing offers a visual narrative of what it means to build upward and organically, taking in consideration that typologies might merge in the future in unexpected ways. It reflects the ambition of the project as both a design vision and a poetic counterpoint to the pressure of ever-expanding urban density.
Studio NousNous continues to explore these questions through ongoing research and collaboration. Together with developers, we investigate and test new nature-inclusive solutions, not only by designing, but by prototyping, visualizing, and studying multiple perspectives. This layered approach helps reveal how the cities of tomorrow can become more resilient, regenerative, and emotionally grounded in the lives of their inhabitants.