Hysan Rooftop Series | Hong Kong

What do you want to see outside the window?

“gLEEful rooftop” is Lee Gardens Association’s initiative to bring joy and surprise to the Causeway Bay community. Eight rooftops in Lee Gardens, Causeway Bay, are revitalised and energised by onebite’s team of designers and community managers to demonstrate how the fusion of old traditional games and new ideas of visual presentation could create conversation starters between different generations and continue to pass on this city’s unique “work-and-play” culture found on tenement rooftops.

“People rarely think about using the roof space – the fifth façade – which can be turned into a nice city space if used smartly and creatively,” says Alan Cheung, Managing Director of onebite. For him, rooftops are more than a communal space but a place where memories are made, where interaction happens between people and architecture, and where culture such as traditional crafts and cultural practices could be passed down from generation to generation. Leftover roof space is envisioned as “the fifth façade” that has enormous potential in the eyes of the architects to strengthen place identity, community belonging, and encourage diversity.

As the project was conceived during Covid-19, which restricted face to face interaction, ideas to remake the rooftop were solicited creatively through “phygital” means using giant QR codes placed on the proposed rooftop locations, inviting visitors and tenants of surrounding high-rise towers to fill in an online questionnaire asking what they would like to see outside the window. The consolidated feedback were then used to generate design ideas, leading to the “kids fun” themed “gLEEful rooftop”. 

onebite’s gLEEful rooftops hope to recapture the carefree and joyful days of childhood through games the community has grown up playing. These include “Hopscotch 跳飛機”, “Red Light, Green Light 紅綠燈”, “Wall Art 畫鬼腳”, “What’s the Time Mr. Wolf 狐狸先生幾多點”, “Hawks Catching Chickens 麻鷹捉雞仔” (a local tag game), paper planes 紙飛機, plastic soccer balls 西瓜波, and more. 

Alan explains the rationale of the design, “Childhood games from different times are recreated on the rooftops using playful and colourful designs to appeal to the young, while the games would spark memories for those young at heart. They would feel they truly belong to the community through these artistic interactions.”