Urban Plateau
Hong Kong SAR
In 1963 Kuyonori Kikutake proposed the Marine City Project in responds to fast urban growth and over congestion in modern cities. Believing the ocean was the only valid space to develop, the Marine City project relied greatly on constructing buildings with new technology such as land reclamation and coastal engineering. Urban Plateau, similarly, took a different approach to view urban congestion and fast development in Hong Kong and invented a new type of skyscraper that required technology from bridge building technology. Urban Plateau proposes to integrate pedestrian bridge typology into the extruded building form and developing a new building typology that reminiscent of a stretch torus shape with the middle levels expanding outward creating multi level connections and extending the pedestrian network at a larger scale. As this new building typology multiples, a new city form would be generated, allowing different mode of circulations to travel discretely and separately. At the urban scale, the proposed project will acts as a stretched pedestrian bridge between the public housing region and the private enclaves. The structure of the new building typology allows floor plates to have different shapes, incorporating water pools and different form of man made typography, as well as forming new pockets of microclimates. By creating connected levels between high rise buildings, this project redefines the relationship between landscape, buildings and infrastructure and explores the possibility of a green, pedestrian friendly and traffic-free elevated city for the future.