The Umwelt City

The city council of Melbourne is planning to shift our city into a car-free city by 2030 and this project is a testing scheme to review the future city as a hybrid and nature-human shared environment by transforming the street into a dense native micro forest, forming as a walled garden that not only produces more enjoyable urban living but also to rebuild Melbourne's natural identity, and sense of place to urbanism.

The Umwelt City is a project that retrofit the city to interface with the new environmental context. A eucalyptus inspired cellular structure skin system is added to the buildings as a threshold that would open-up the building edge as a vertical outdoor environment and to provide animal habitation onto it. Additionally, considering the current situation of the year 2020, a huge vacancy issue occurred on single-purposed buildings and acknowledging the prosperity of online-working. The skin is to extend as an internal social platform that would fit for multi-purpose usage according to the programs it's attached to, meanwhile acting as a vertical passageway to the retrofitted public roof-plaza, a new public district from the unused space in the city and diverse building purposes.¬