Looking a little like a giant white pinecone, the design for this new high-rise apartment building in Montpellier, France, uses strategically placed balconies and shades to give residents the maximum outdoor space without blocking views or taking up too much room on the ground.

“We wanted to preserve the site as much as possible,” says Manal Rachdi, whose architecture firm worked on the project with Sou Fujimoto andNicolas Laisné Associates. “The idea is to have, in this urban landscape, a continuity from an existing park to our site.”

Inspired by the shape of a tree, the architects used a smaller footprint for the base and “leaves” expanding outward on higher floors.