Roller Coaster: Retail Architecture That Moves with the Seasons

What if a shopping center operated on the logic of a roller coaster? Not the thrill ride itself, but the infrastructure: a continuous track system along which retail units physically relocate, reconfigure, and respond to the calendar. That is the provocation at the heart of this project, which replaces the fixed retail floor plate with mobile shelving units and vendor pods that slide along tracks, turning a corridor into something closer to a living organism than a building.

Designed by Chuying Chen and 雨鑫 刘, the project received an Organizer's Choice Award in the Upcycling Retail 2019 competition. The scheme proposes a North-to-South Corridor linking North Park with the Southern Open Space, establishing a spine for future urban development while embedding retail, communal, and horticultural programs along its length.

Terraces in Snowfall: Retail as Inhabitable Section

The section drawing captures the project's ambition to stack public life vertically. Multi-level terraces host planted boxes and gathering spaces, depicted here under falling snow to emphasize the seasonal dimension of the design. This is not a climate-controlled mall hermetically sealed from weather; it is a structure that acknowledges and performs with seasonal change. Adjacent illustrated panels show people occupying communal spaces framed by exposed structure, reinforcing the idea that architecture here is scaffold, not enclosure.

The sequential narrative format is deliberate. Rather than presenting a single heroic render, the designers use comic-like panels to show how the same spaces serve different social rituals across time. It is a representational strategy that aligns perfectly with their argument: a retail environment should never look the same twice.

Reclaiming the Parking Lot

An aerial illustration reveals the site's existing condition: a vast, underutilized parking lot scattered with figures and annotated with text that maps its latent potential. The designers read this asphalt field not as dead space but as a canvas for modular retail occupation. The comic strip panels that follow introduce human narrative, with dialogue bubbles floating over storefronts and signage, grounding the infrastructural ambition in the everyday experience of vendors and shoppers negotiating the space.

By foregrounding storytelling, Chen and 刘 make a case that retail architecture is ultimately a social contract. The parking lot is the raw material; the roller coaster track is the mechanism; but the real design work lies in choreographing encounters between people, goods, and seasons.

The Corridor as Urban Spine

The axonometric drawing makes the organizational logic legible. Retail units align along the North-to-South Corridor, their repeated modular forms suggesting a kit-of-parts approach that can accommodate more vendors and seasonal businesses as demand shifts. Figures populate the ground plane below, establishing scale and rhythm. The corridor is not merely circulation; it is the project's primary public space, a connective thread designed to catalyze future urban expansion.

Paired with this is a section through a greenhouse-like structure where planters and vegetation take center stage. People tend to the plants, blurring the boundary between retail and agriculture, consumer and producer. The seasonal transformation strategy becomes tangible here: in warmer months, the corridor could host market gardens; in winter, the same structure shelters vendors and community programs. Job creation is embedded in the flexibility of the system rather than dictated by a fixed program.

Escalators, Dirigibles, and Suspended Lanterns

The final pair of sections push the project into speculative territory. One drawing layers multi-level circulation, escalators, and a dirigible floating overhead against an orange sky, suggesting that the corridor could evolve into a regional connector, not just a local amenity. The other depicts terraced interior spaces hung with suspended lanterns, figures leaning against railings and inhabiting what feels more like a festival ground than a shopping center. The orange atmospheric backdrop lends both images a cinematic quality that distinguishes them from typical competition submissions.

These are not technical construction documents. They are persuasion machines, designed to make a viewer feel what a dynamic retail environment could be. The dirigible may be whimsical, but the underlying argument is serious: if retail architecture is going to survive the shift to online commerce, it must offer spatial experiences that a screen cannot replicate.

Why This Project Matters

The retail sector's crisis is well documented, but most architectural responses default to mixed-use densification or experiential branding. Chen and 刘 propose something more radical: an architecture that is literally in motion. By borrowing the infrastructure of a roller coaster, they reframe the retail floor plate as a dynamic system capable of seasonal adaptation, vendor rotation, and incremental urban growth along a clear corridor strategy.

The project's strength lies in its refusal to separate infrastructure from narrative. Every drawing tells a story about people, weather, and commerce operating together within a flexible framework. As an Organizer's Choice selection in Upcycling Retail 2019, it signals a generational shift in how young designers think about commercial architecture: not as a container for consumption, but as a choreography of public life.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Chuying Chen, 雨鑫 刘

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Project credits: roller coaster by Chuying Chen, 雨鑫 刘 Upcycling Retail 2019 (uni.xyz).