Nacka city’s new landmark – Discus – won the prestigious DNA Paris Design Award in the housing category at the DNA Summer Design Conference in Paris, in June 2019.

Designed by architectural firm Belatchew Arkitekter, on behalf of Swedish real estate developer Sveafastigheter Utveckling, Discus is a skyscraper situated in a booming part of the Stockholm metropolitan area in Sweden.

As a piece of modern architecture, Discus is expected to open gates to structures that represent culture, sustainability and effective technology, all in one, and as a piece of art, it would be a building that can truly absorb all that is dark around it, translate it into light and embrace its hometown with that illumination.

Located in the heart of Nacka's new public transport node, right above the metro station in the new city centre, Discus is a significant symbol of a growing metropolitan area.

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The architect, Rahel Belatchew, had her mind set on extracting and exploiting the potential of the site to execute a sustainable design that would not just add glamour, but also work as a value addition for the entire city.

The building distributes itself into 30 floors with a capacity to accommodate 450 to 500 apartments, along with commercial and public facilities. The entire design stands as an adaptation of a modular city, which will support and ameliorate the public transport facilities with a direct gateway to access metro.

Belatchew was not consumed by the vision of only creating an aesthetic design. The plan incorporated a system for energy consumption to be held at low levels along with the combined use of locally produced energy from solar panels.

The idea was to provide for a map that directs to sustainable architecture and acts as a foundation for all the architectural ambitions that the Nacka Municipality holds in its sight for the future of the emerging metropolitan.

The architecture is a bold representation of ideas and thoughts executed in the contemporary times to provide a framework of the future in architecture and design.

The upcoming building has already attracted international attention and received awards too. In 2018, Discus was adjudged the winner of World Architecture News (WAN) awards in the ‘Future Projects: Residential’ category where it faced competition from Chicago, Louisiana, Miami and Tehran, and later was also awarded the Architecture Master Prize (AMP).

(Text by Palak Maheshwari, intern at stirworld.com)