San Francisco, California, USA

What happens when we add vertical and three-dimensional travel to the speed of our urban experience?

Pickard Chilton and Arup have collaborated on the concept design for a Mega-Skyport – Uber’s vision for a next-generation urban aviation transport system. Dubbed “Sky Tower,” the project is intended to facilitate at least 1,000 vehicle arrivals and 1,000 departures per hour, with each vehicle accommodating up to five passengers.

The Mega-Skyport won a Good Design Award in 2019 from The Chicago Athenaeum.

Since development of the eVTOL aircraft is beyond the scope of this project, Uber provided speculative dimensions and minimum durations for operational maneuvers on a helipad (landing, taxi, charging, loading, takeoff) which add up to require six helipads for landing and six for takeoff. Recharging the aircraft will take a minimum of five minutes, which leaves at least fifteen aircraft waiting to take off at each helipad.

Careful analysis of aircraft movement and passenger comfort using calculations and computational simulations validated the design decision to dock the aircraft on moving platforms and begin charging immediately after landing. A precisely choreographed sequence allows each craft to land, recharge, board, and reposition for take-off within five minutes.

With each aircraft accommodating up to five passengers, the resulting turnaround can transport over 10,000 passengers per hour – roughly half the hourly throughput of Los Angeles’ LAX airport – so access to quality transit is vital. The mega-skyport offers direct connections to commuter trains, buses, bicycles and a fleet of autonomous electric cars.

Though this exploration focused on a particular site, the modular, extensible design is envisioned to enable deployment in a variety of configurations, tuned to meet the contextual and throughput requirements of other locations in the transportation network.

Historically, urban space has existed within the pedestrian realm – a series of streets, promenades and grand urban spaces all accessed and experienced with the strolling speed of a brisk walk.

With the advent of the street car and automobile, urban spaces began to change in size and scale to accommodate these new technologies.

While the Sky Tower is conceptual, it is not science fiction. Based on a pragmatic and research driven approach, the Sky Tower concept delivers to Uber a modular, extensible and sustainable solution that supports their vision for the future of intra-urban transportation.

Customers can either push the soapbox up a hill or ride it down, or have two people push each other around in it – which is what the HMETC team did during testing.

“In the car industry, we get so used to thinking within certain boxes, but this time, the door was open. With this project, we were free to be creative and think outside the box,” states Thomas Bürkle, Head of Hyundai Europe Design Center.

“The 45’s concept language is a very easy-to-remember form. The graphics and shapes will stay in your memory. In this way, we thought it was a good fit for the soapbox, because we want children to grow up and remember building the soapbox together with their parents.”

Architects: Pickard Chilton and Arup
Client: Uber Technologies, Inc.