Challenge

Beyond the Roof 

 

The big city continues to pursue its audacious scheme for vertical growth, climbing higher and higher, following the frantic gentrification of heights. The space above the built landscape therefore encourages the exploration and search for residual spaces that have, for various reasons, escaped the rules of the urban grid and real estate markets that prize perched vistas. The construction of this interval between roof and sky reveals parcels of an invisible landscape that has not yet been explored to its full potential. 

 

Subject 

 

This year’s contest is based on the idea that the spaces that exist on the world's rooftops are underutilized and remain uninvested. 

 

An invisible landscape from the street, and difficult to access, constructions on rooftops are places of possibility. Rooftop construction becomes a formal extension of the architecture that serves as its foundation, and a platform for its extension. We can instinctively understand the rationality of the roof and its formal relationship that protects what’s within and adapts to the climate. But we must try here to express the limitations of these structures, by reimagining the ingenuity, armature, accessibility, and programming of a built canopy above.

 

We will expect proposals that are the tangible mark of what, in a free reinterpretation of conventions, opens the imagination and could redefine the design of the future city. Bachelard wrote: “A house is imagined as a vertical being. It rises upward. It differentiates itself in terms of its verticality. It is one of the appeals to our consciousness of verticaliy”*. What lies at the peak of this verticality? What can be created beyond it? Who owns the roof and the sky above it? How can the vertical end of a building breed a new beginning? 

 

*Bachelard, Gaston, La poétique de l’espace, éd. établie par G. Hiéronymus, Quadrige, 2020 (orig. 1957), p. 71. https://gastonbachelard.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/BACHELARD-Gaston-La-poetique-de-l-espace.pdf edition quoted from The Poetics of Space, Penguin Classics, London, 2014, translation Maria Jolas, p.39.

 

 

Design proposal

 

Each participating team will choose the roof of an existing building and propose an intervention that may take advantage of, or challenge, the roof as a fifth facade.

 

The project should redefine these roofscapes which could, for example, call into question the notions of property, habitat, use and legislation. The renewed visibility of the roof and its accessibility could also reinvent how we approach gentrification of urban centers, adaptation to climate change, or even access to the coveted spaces atop our cities which opens onto the sky. 

 

 

Documents to be submitted: 

 

 

References

 

If applicable, use the following maps (or maps relevant to your desired site within Canada) to source information about the height and zoning of the site of your design proposal. 

 

These designated zones and conventions are not meant to be guidelines for your intervention; you are free to propose concepts that challenge these constraints.

 

City of Montreal Interactive Zoning Map

https://spectrum.montreal.ca/connect/analyst/mobile/#/main?mapcfg=-%20Ahuntsic-Cartierville&mapc=

 

Ville de Québec Interactive Map

https://carte.ville.quebec.qc.ca/carteinteractive/

 

City of Toronto Interactive Zoning Map

https://map.toronto.ca/maps/map.jsp?app=ZBL_CONSULT

 

Geo Ottawa

https://maps.ottawa.ca/geoottawa/

 

City of Vancouver Digital Zoning Map

https://maps.vancouver.ca/zoning/