‘Life on Sky’s Edge’ by Ying Xuan Chian
MEng Structural Engineering and Architecture with a Year in Industry (2016 - 2022)
University of Sheffield, UK
Life on Sky’s Edge: Reimagining high street rooftops as a learning tool for citizens about life in the post-pandemic city
This speculative proposal for Sheffield’s The Moor Quarter synergizes various programmes and events that take place in the city centre through a reimagination of rooftops as an alternative high street, facilitating the return to urban life in post-pandemic times while offering new ways of engaging with the city through creative means of safe distancing and quarantining (via the vertical axis rather than the horizontal!).
Following the urban topography comprising existing building forms, the scheme is naturally characterized by its segmentation into programmatic quarters, each with a unique core programme (commercial, educational, leisure etc.). These quarters are linked by moving crane bridges, which animate the high street while ensuring safe and efficient circulation.
The rooftop high street is accessed via lifts and stairwells retrofitted onto building facades, as well as vehicle lifts, which allow delivery vehicles, pop-up shops, food trucks, mobile libraries, and various pick-up services to access the rooftop level.
The main typology of the proposed ‘high street in the sky’ are modular steel units which can be assembled into various sizes for various activities/purposes, much like a life-sized K’NEX kit. Existing facades are converted into green walls and bouldering walls to support urban biodiversity and sporting activities.
The scheme endeavours to display the inner workings and highlight the importance of essential services such as sustainable food and clothing production, waste recycling, and the curation/ production of media. As such, these ‘behind the scenes’ vignettes constitute an integral part of the urban experience, rather than being relegated to the outskirts and into warehouses.
Citizens are encouraged to engage actively with post-pandemic urban life through gamification. Every public restroom has a ‘handwashing game’ to promote personal hygiene, and grocery stores are fitted with kitchen pods for public use to encourage recipe sharing through cooking demonstrations.
1: Offices and co-working spaces form the commercial quarter, with an urban farm, petting zoo, solar car parks and electric car charging points. The supermarket features self-cleaning cooking
demonstration pods, where customers can share quarantine recipes, from banana bread to curries, from a safe distance.
2: The school zone includes cantilevered classrooms, lecture halls, and leisure spaces, as well as rooftop sporting facilities and climbing/abseiling walls alongside self-watering living walls. Stilted counselling pods in the youth services quarter overlook the skatepark while affording privacy.
3: Leisure and retail quarters – karaoke rooms and arcades suspended from an edifice, bowling alleys straddling two buildings, a water park and pop-up hotel, a museum with embedded curating offices, and an open-air retail park with events such as farmers’ markets and performances integrated into circulation spaces, as well as production activities (writers’/artists’ studios, robotics workshops, aquaponics farms) in cantilevered units above.
4: Movable pop-sauna and spa barrels under archways, film screenings under the stars…
5: The digital quarter features a labyrinth with AR/VR exhibitions, a treasure hunt maze, workshops-on-wheels…all situated in proximity to a recycling facility and a medical research lab.
6: The unique staggered form of the Moor Foot building accommodates a pop-up hospital with colour-coded zones and isolation pods, staggered quarantine hubs, and even a ski slope.
Ying Xuan Chian / MEng Structural Engineering and Architecture / University of Sheffield, UK (2016-22)
I am Ying, a structural engineering and architecture student at the University of Sheffield interested in designing for wellbeing, currently completing a year in Industry in two parts: firstly, working with a small sauna design company in England till March, then in a land planning division in Singapore till September.
Urban design, participatory design, protopia, learning, wellbeing, rooftop, high street, playable city, COVID-19
