AN ESSAY OF LIVING ABOVE GROUND.

11 July 2002
This was an original short note of me during the study years back in 2002. It was my first critique on highrise. (this was not an school assignment)

Hanging Gardens of Babylon
This hand-coloured engraving by the 16th-century Dutch artist Martin Heemskerck depicts the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. According to the tradition, the gardens did not hang, but grew on the roofs and terraces of the royal palace in Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar II, the Chaldean king, is supposed to have had the gardens built in about 600 bc as a consolation to his Median wife, who missed the natural surroundings of her homeland. SOURCE: Wikimedia

Sometimes we design things without considering that we will be living in it. If we do think about living in it we may not realize how life would be when we live in it. So much idea, so much concepts, so confusing about explanation of our life that we live.

Every living creature has their own habitat or style of living. This style is the nature of the living creature. We are a part of living creature which had .......living which proposed by versatile.

How are we going to design a living that sits beyond above ground. Maybe it was the same dilemma as how the birds in the sky think to live in the ground. To design a living space that we do not live in is the most difficult task of all. Imagine a fish living in the sea, designs it’s colony on a mountain. The fish would be thinking like crazy to resolve issues which are not issues to the creatures that live up on the mountain. If only they learn from the living creatures on the mountain how life is at the top of the world, then maybe someday and some how the fish can live on top of it.

Most of designers for the skycaps are to provide the ground creatures living and having their life on the sky as similar as possible like the way they do on the ground. In the end, they actually design a compound that is not a nature to creatures living in the sky.

Says Yeang, ‘….. should be imagined as "cities in the sky" with good pedestrian linkages, public realms, civic zones, vistas, and sense of places extended upwards. You map a tall building the same way you do a city, with zones for parking, offices, and social spaces.’

But actually what Yeang

has done is out of the nature living or thinking vertically. He only made an assumption that the same problem happens when you have a horizontal layout. The feeling of treatment for the living spaces will create a monotone feeling or a similar or familiar environment as the horizontal living on the ground. This is not designing living above ground but it is like a man that wears a bird costume but sits on a bench.