Vari Architects Turns the Roof Above Its Own Chongqing Studio into a Three-Tier Public Market

Most architects wait for a client to hand them a brief. With aa Market, Vari Architects wrote their own. The studio, led on this project by Qi Fan with landscape design by Liu Xiang, wanted somewhere above its office to eat, drink tea and meet friends and neighbours. That small need grew into a 4,000 m² rooftop lifestyle market on the top floor of the RICHAUS building, inside an industrial park in Chongqing. The firm initiated it, designed it and now operates it.

The architecture matters less as an object than as a shift in who does what. The market adds no new building. It keeps the existing concrete structure and reorganises it into three stacked tiers: shops, plazas and event space at the bottom, a mesh of elevated corridors and stairs in the middle, and an open-sky garden on top. In a city defined by slopes, flyovers and stairways, that vertical layering suits the place well. The project treats the overlooked roof as one more level of the street, not as leftover space.

An Atrium That Behaves Like a Town Square

You arrive in a square-like atrium roughly 8 m deep, and the photographs show it filling up like a plaza. People sit on timber benches under a mezzanine, children watch the crowd from the foot of a dark steel stair, and visitors stand around in a covered concrete passage beneath a pink pendant. The existing beams and diagonal rafters stay exposed overhead. That works in the project's favour, because the room reads as a found public space and not a designed retail environment.

From this square the plan narrows into a main walkway about 2.4 m wide, with smaller side paths crossing it. That width is a deliberate choice. It is tight enough to make strangers pass close to one another and wide enough to slow down. Full-height glazing at the shopfronts keeps each unit visually tied to that shared spine, so browsing and circulating become the same activity.

Courtyards Cut into a Concrete Floor

The most decisive moves are subtractive. Planted voids open the deep floor plate to light, and slender trees rise from timber-edged planters toward a louvred skylight. Seen from below, the tree canopy, steel beams and stair treads overlap into a single vertical picture. That gives the interior a sense of depth that a flat retail floor rarely has.

These courtyards also set the pace of a visit. A glazed opening frames a sunlit patch of gravel, groundcover and a steel bench, with a stair climbing to the terrace above. Each void gives you a reason to stop and a hint of where to go next. This is wayfinding by landscape, and it does more than signage could.

The Middle Tier as a Network of Routes

The middle level is where the Chongqing reference becomes concrete. Elevated walkways with steel railings run past timber-clad parapets, track lights hang from weathered rafters, and concrete-framed openings look across to exterior stairs. Moving through it feels less like a mall mezzanine and more like walking the city's stepped alleys, where you are always slightly above or below someone else.

Vari keeps the services visible. Pipes and ducts run along the soffits, and an exit sign glows at the end of a corridor. We read this as honest rather than unfinished: the building's industrial-park origins stay legible, and the budget goes into planting and routes instead of ceilings.

Seating Tucked into Corners and Planting

Seating is scattered, never centralised. Café tables sit beneath a raw concrete beam beside a bed of tall palms; a wooden bench hides behind banana leaves at a glazed courtyard edge; wooden chairs share an open concrete hall with dracaena and ferns. No single food court dominates. The planting divides the floor into rooms without walls, and each pocket holds a few people comfortably.

This is where the project's origin as the architects' own lunch spot shows. The scale of these corners suits a pot of tea with a neighbour, not throughput. Whether that intimacy survives peak footfall is the real operational test, and it helps that the designers are also the operators.

Timber, Brick and Raw Concrete

The retained concrete frame is the base, and the images suggest a restrained set of additions laid over it. Weathered timber panels sit above a board-formed concrete wall behind white louvres. A pivoting timber door opens from a brick-tiled elevator lobby onto a plank-floored courtyard. A narrow passage pairs monstera leaves with a timber-clad wall under exposed ducts.

The pivoting door deserves attention. The lift is the main way into a rooftop market, and turning that threshold into a large timber panel that swings open onto a courtyard makes arrival feel like an event. Small gestures like this do much of the work of saying that the roof is now public.

Looking Across and Down Between Levels

The three tiers are designed to be seen into, not just walked through. From balcony edges you look down on a lower group gathered at a small table among potted plants. From above, a large philodendron sits between wooden stools and tall windows. These overlooks turn other visitors into part of the view, which is how good public space works in dense cities: you go partly to watch people.

A Garden Open to the Chongqing Sky

The top tier pays off the climb. A curving path of steel grating winds through gravel beds of cacti and grasses toward a glazed pavilion, with hazy towers on the horizon. The grating keeps the garden visually light and lets the planting read as continuous ground. Nearby, a sunlit terrace holds white folding tables, potted shrubs and cypress-like trees against a white brick wall.

The furniture is loose and portable, which matches the brief's emphasis on adaptable event space. The roof can be a garden on Tuesday and a market or gathering space at the weekend. The sources we reviewed say nothing about shading or heat management on this exposed level, and in Chongqing's summers those details will decide how much use the garden gets.

Plans and Drawings

The three base plans show the strategy clearly. The lowest level is a long central corridor with rooms on both sides and wings projecting at each end. The middle level breaks that corridor into small courtyards, stairs and planted voids along a spine. On the roof, a curved garden path runs within the pitched-roof outline of the cross-shaped building.

The exploded axonometric is the key drawing. Green vertical bands connect the roof gardens to the floors below, showing that the planted voids act as the project's real structure of movement. Sections A-A and B-B confirm this, with a tree rising through a central void and planted terraces stepping across the top.

The annotated plans follow routes in red and orange through courtyards, retail zones and stair cores, and pair each one with small photographs. Together they read like a user's guide to the market, which suits a project whose authors also run it.

Why This Project Matters

aa Market shows an alternative model of practice: architects who identify an unused space, design for their own daily needs, and then take responsibility for running the result. Being both author and operator removes the usual gap between drawing and use. Decisions about bench placement, path width and planting density can be adjusted by the people who see the results every day.

It also argues that Chongqing's most valuable reserve of public space may already be built. Thousands of rooftops sit above offices and industrial parks across the city. By keeping the concrete frame and investing in voids, routes and planting instead of new construction, Vari offers a repeatable and comparatively modest way to extend the street upward. We would like to see the idea tested on rooftops the architects do not own.

aa Market by Vari Architects (lead architect Qi Fan; landscape design by Liu Xiang), Chongqing, China. Area: 4,000 m². Completed: 2026. Photography: DID STUDIO and IN-FIELD Studio.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.