SPEED BUILDINGS are horizontal civic megastructures built over highways, converting transport speed into public accessibility while freeing ground-level territory for restored nature and metropolitan landscapes.

Early artworks dating 2016

Project Overview

SPEED BUILDINGS is a typological proposal for constructing linear public and mixed-use buildings directly over urban highways and high-capacity road corridors. The project reclaims the “empty” spatial layer of transport infrastructure—airspace above roads—transforming it into an inhabitable, programmable territory with high-speed accessibility.

Conceived as horizontal skyscrapers (often extending hundreds of meters up to a kilometer or more), SPEED BUILDINGS reorganize public programs along linear flows rather than vertical stacking. Internal mobility is handled through horizontal circulation systems, allowing large-scale institutions to operate as continuous, infrastructural environments.

The proposal addresses two critical urban deficits simultaneously:

Typology and Program

SPEED BUILDINGS are conceived as infrastructure-integrated civic megastructures hosting programs that benefit from direct, rapid access and metropolitan-scale service radii, such as:

  • hospitals and emergency departments

  • ambulance and fire response hubs

  • crisis management and civil protection

  • metropolitan administration and civic services

  • logistics + public services

  • mixed public programs (education, sports, retail, mobility hubs)

Rather than being “neighborhood destinations,” these buildings operate as strategic metropolitan nodes, aligned with the city’s fastest arteries.

Pillar 1 — Zero Distance (integrating production/logistics into everyday life)

While SPEED BUILDINGS is not primarily a food-production typology, it aligns with the Zero Distance logic through time-distance minimization and operational proximity:

  • The project reframes “distance” as a systemic metric (time-to-service), not only as meters or location.

  • Emergency healthcare and public services become nearby in time, regardless of spatial dispersion.

  • The typology can host distributed logistics and support functions (medical supply, maintenance, municipal operations) embedded within the corridor, reducing long-range urban supply loops and duplicated land-take.

PVW reading: Zero Distance expands from “garden-to-plate” to “service-to-city,” turning speed and infrastructure into proximity.

Pillar 2 — Integration of Transport and Architecture

This is the core pillar of SPEED BUILDINGS.

SPEED BUILDINGS propose a direct coupling between:

  • dominant mobility systems (highways, metropolitan road networks)

  • and architectural form (linear megastructure, horizontal circulation, infrastructural sections)

The project treats the highway not as an external constraint but as a primary architectural generator:

  • access logic is embedded in the corridor

  • architectural massing aligns with traffic vectors

  • the building becomes an inhabitable extension of mobility infrastructure


Pillar 3 — Integration of Nature and Habitation

SPEED BUILDINGS makes a strategic shift: instead of competing with nature for ground-level land, it relocates large building mass into the airspace above infrastructure, enabling ecological recovery at grade.

Key nature outcomes:

  • freed land along corridors can become continuous parks and ecological buffers

  • highways can be reframed as green linear landscapes, not urban scars

  • potential for multi-level urban ecology: mobility below, inhabitation above, nature restored adjacent and beneath

  • the typology supports a “layered city” where systems coexist without direct conflict

Importantly, the project proposes nature not as decorative greenery on a façade, but as territorial restoration—a spatial and ecological rebalancing.