See the Final Presentations 2005

"Steps Tower" by Changan Liu, strengthening an existing urban route by creating an axis focused on the Swiss Re Tower.  

"Let us throw away sidewalks, arcades, steps... lets us raise the level of the city" - Sant Elia, Futurist Manifesto, 1914

The subject for this project is the creation of a series of skyscrapers on different sites across the City of London, connected by a network of ‘skybridges’. The skybridge linkages break down the stereotype of the tall building as an isolationist icon, and offers rich experiential opportunities and fire evacuation efficiencies. Each student designed their tall building individually – deriving the programmatic brief from a study of site and precedent - and then worked collaboratively with peers on adjoining sites to design the skybridges.

The project began with a fieldtrip to London, and incorporated a structural experimentation exercise titled ‘Skyscrapers in Spaghetti’. A 1:500 physical site model of the City was created as a testing platform for design development and for presentation purposes at the final review.

The Pavements in the Sky final projects incorporate a wide range of design agendas; these include a project looking to recreate the scale and feel of low-rise urban streets within a high-rise building, a project that leans out its residential floors allowing sun and light to infiltrate into atria behind and a design inspired by the abstract compositions of the De Stijl movement.