a predominantly urban nation since 2011, china challenges by the problems of dense urbanization, industrialization, air pollution, and climate change.  a declining farming population with implications for food security is not doing any good.

uplife makes the most of urban and rural living in a strong and happy vertical farming community with the help of technology blended into architecture.

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uplife is a prototype hybrid project for a “vertical intelligent community” that embodies digitally enhanced technologies integrated into architecture in response to an ongoing phenomenon of climate change, air pollution, and thus life expectancy in densely populated cities in Asia. in this respect, the first ten floors of this 28 stories smart building called “international healthcare area talent apartment” is redesigned apart from the rest, to support and enhance the sense of a vibrant and connected vertical community, in which urban farms and gardens are spread out disrupting the existing structure, creating engaged terraces of shared public space that harbor producing, consuming and waste management in circulation with energy efficiency and renewable energy monitored, controlled and analyzed with narrowband IoT, forming a closed-loop of self-sufficient urban life.

China has been farmed for over 8000 years. over this time, forests were progressively cleared for agriculture and other needs.  ineffective use of land and nature over thousands of years degraded the environment. thus, last two decades, large-scale, integrated sustainability programs were developed to improve both environmental and socio-economical conditions.

erosion, sedimentation, flooding; conservation of forests; mitigation of desertification and dust storms; and increasing agricultural productivity are eco-environmental objectives, complemented by socio-economic ones, to improve food security and household income to achieve a holistic approach to managing land systems. despite considerable efforts, china still faces enormous social and ecological environmental sustainability challenges associated with rapid development, industrialization, and urbanization.

how can we create a self-sufficient and sustainable vertical community, that becomes a regular living condition in china, triggering connection and communication with the needs of the public realm, mediating technology, and making farming cool again?

terrace farming is all about taming the wild Chinese landscape and making something out of nothing. Chinese gardens are about landscape and the imagination of the landscape, full of symbols and allegories. pagodas are dominant and attractive elements of the cultural landscape of China,  towering, multi-tiered mysterious structures.

inspired as we were trying to convey the spirit of the Chinese landscape and architecture, these simplified lines, angles, rising elevation, radiating rays of sunshine, and lives are used in search of a contemporary equivalent, and this practice is extended to the UPLIFE, by invoking the local heritage, vertical communal gardens are inserted into the existing milieu, by disrupting a void resembling and layering the dragon void, injecting diversity, leveling up a miniature semi-public street grid, which is also integrated not only to the public but also to the conceptual experiment unit of future residence.

inspired by the amazing landscape and traditional building types of china, terraced living and farming are encoded as major elements to uplife that outset from the ground up to the sky, laying grift visual and audial connections, creating an open neighborhood and ecological life, including all the amenities and common areas an urban farmer community needs.

a closed-loop life is maintained with an ecological chain of production, consumption, waste, recycling, and circulation. renewable energy systems are included to empower a self-sufficient environment for vertical urban farming with operable solar arrays on the facade, micro-wind turbines in dragon voids, small-scale hydroelectric generators, water sourced heating-cooling systems sourcing from the Yangtze river, rain harvesting for planting, waste management/biomass into clean energy.

control systems are used to secure conditions of optimal living and vertical farming, like passive and active cooling and heating, double facade daylight control, air quality control, and green network sensors combined with IoT, which are easily monitored and controlled with the smartphone application UPLIFE users connected to drones.