Singapore has a beautiful waterfront and a street food heritage that some feel needs reinvigorated. Intending to jump-start the conversation about it are SPARK Architects, who unveiled a proposal for a mobile, reconfigurable, and sustainable floating cooked-food center (also known as hawker center). Called the Solar Orchid project, it's a pop-up shop that could potentially appear in numerous locations with a variety of vendors who operate within its pods.
The design features a protective canopy that's a solar-energy generating, inflated pillow-top with thin-film photovoltaic cells. There are multiple floating, compartmentalized areas, and each houses a different street food purveyor. The pods accommodate cooking stalls and have built-in exhaust, water, gas, electrical, waste collection, water recycling services, and table settings. They are modular, meaning they can be clustered together depending on their locale. And when it's time to clean up, you won't even realize that they were there thanks to their self-contained nature.
