Victory Valley is a high-rise residential development, in Gurgaon, which is a fast developing city in India with new townships being developed by private developers. Here, I provide a broad overview of the priorities that guided our proposal for this project.

Site. Given the irregular shape of the parcel, we designed something I believe is a departure from similar sites planned along a regular grid. This in turn influenced the layout of units. We had the idea of extrusions from the ground that would create an undulating, non-uniform ribbon of blocks that has become a ‘signature’ of the project.

Form. There are mountains in the distance and we took cues from nature in the course of form-making. The constant addition and subtraction of form that was necessary to arrive at the current iteration was part of creating at an organic form; incorporating the ‘mountain range’ into the profile of the belt of row housing and towers.

Patterns. We drew inspiration from the former use of the land—agriculture—taking the pattern of farm plots and mapping them onto the site. This informed certain gridlines, proportions and layouts. The agricultural land patterns also form a landscaped elevated deck, which we termed as a valley.

Communities. We were also thinking about the implications of new communities in up and coming townships. Here, a sense of community was important. I imagined a huge garden that linked all of the blocks. Instead of creating multiple pockets of gardens, we envisaged a garden much like New York City’s Central Park. Most of the units face the valley and when you have buildings facing each other within a reasonable distance, there is already closeness amongst neighbours. Gurgaon being semi-arid, the valley was envisaged as a cool, shaded communal area. An understanding of the local culture helped us provide facilities that were relevant to the local population. We introduced swings for each unit and a cricket pitch as well.

The client was happy with the idea of a continuous valley form set amidst the development and hence the name “Victory Valley”.