01
The brief
Al Noor Heights is a semi-gated residential community in Damascus Countryside, a few minutes from the M5 highway, and NoVi's commission was its design and architecture. The master plan sets 68 residential towers of 12 floors on six plots, with a central commercial spine, a dedicated education zone and connected green belts — 8,160 homes for a planned population of 27,744 residents.
The homes come in three types: one-bedroom apartments of 80 m², two-bedroom apartments of 145 m² and three-bedroom apartments of 160 m². The images on this page are stills from the project's promotional film, taken from NoVi's visualisations of the master plan, the landscape, the towers and the apartment interiors.
02
The challenge
At almost a thousand residents per hectare, density is the defining question. Eight thousand homes can easily become an anonymous grid of blocks, with streets taken over by cars and little sense of which neighbourhood is yours. The plan has to give every unit light and a view, keep traffic and parking away from where children play, and still leave room for the school, the shops and the parks that a community of this size needs.
03
Our approach
NoVi broke the scale down into clusters of eleven to thirteen towers, each set around its own shared gardens, pools and community facilities and oriented for sun and views. Parking goes underground, so the ground between the towers becomes landscape: a central park with lakes, walking and jogging trails, children's play areas and shaded seating, stitched together by green belts.
Through the centre runs the Golden Avenue, a palm-lined retail spine of shops, restaurants and cafés that opens onto a community plaza with a fountain, with an international school for 2,700 students and its sports fields alongside. The towers pair contemporary glass façades with wide, curved balconies and rooftop pools, and the design adds rooftop solar panels, vertical gardens and green roofs, energy-efficient glazing and smart water management.
