Look What They Put on the Roof (9 Photos)

What’s Up There?

Most roofs hold nothing more exciting than an air conditioner. These ones hold a ski slope, a car test track and even a school bus.

From a power plant in Copenhagen that doubles as a ski hill to a house in Oxford with a shark sticking out of it, here are nine rooftops with something unexpected on top.

---

🏎️ Lingotto — Turin, Italy 🇮🇹

Fiat built cars on the way up through the Lingotto factory, and the finished cars were driven on a test track on the roof.

💡 Fact: Built between 1916 and 1923, the factory closed in 1982 and was turned into shops, a hotel and a concert hall by architect Renzo Piano. The rooftop track appears in the 1969 film The Italian Job.

📷 Photo: Gunnar Klack / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

---

🌿 Impéria — Nessonvaux, Belgium 🇧🇪

Lingotto wasn’t the only one. The old Impéria car factory in a Belgian river valley also had a track on top, and today grass and young trees grow on the concrete.

💡 Fact: From 1928 to 1958, Impéria tested its cars on a track over 1,000 meters (3,300 ft) long that was built partly on top of the factory.

📷 Photo: PHCDIMB / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

---

🏁 Edificio Chrysler — Buenos Aires, Argentina 🇦🇷

This 1929 aerial photo shows a car dealership in Buenos Aires with a round, banked test track on its roof, where buyers could see the cars driven.

💡 Fact: The building opened in 1928 and was designed by Mario Palanti, the architect of Palacio Barolo. In 1994 it became luxury lofts, and a garden with a swimming pool now fills the circle where the track ran.

📷 Photo: Unknown author / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

---

🏂 CopenHill — Copenhagen, Denmark 🇩🇰

CopenHill burns city waste to make electricity and heat, and people ski and snowboard down its roof all year round.

💡 Fact: The building is 85 meters (279 ft) tall, and the artificial ski slope, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, opened to the public in 2019. One side also holds an 80-meter (262 ft) climbing wall.

📷 Photo: Kristoffer Dahl / News Øresund / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

---

🚌 City Museum — St. Louis, USA 🇺🇸

The roof of City Museum holds a small Ferris wheel, a slide, and a yellow school bus that sticks out past the edge of the building (top left).

💡 Fact: Artist Bob Cassilly and his then-wife Gail bought the empty International Shoe Company building in 1993 and opened it as a museum in 1997. Visitors can walk into the rooftop bus and sit in the driver’s seat.

📷 Photo: stefib230 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

---

🎡 HEP Five — Osaka, Japan 🇯🇵

A bright red Ferris wheel sticks out of the roof of the HEP Five shopping mall in the middle of Osaka’s Umeda district.

💡 Fact: The wheel is 75 meters (246 ft) across, and its top is 106 meters (348 ft) above the street.

📷 Photo: Mc681 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

---

🦈 The Headington Shark — Oxford, England 🇬🇧

On an ordinary street in Headington, a 7.6-meter (25 ft) shark looks as if it fell from the sky and crashed head-first through a house roof.

💡 Fact: Sculptor John Buckley put it up on August 9, 1986, without permission, as a protest against war and nuclear weapons. The city council fought for six years to remove it, and in 2022 it was made a local heritage site.

📷 Photo: Balon Greyjoy / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

---

🌳 Namba Parks — Osaka, Japan 🇯🇵

Trees, paths and gardens climb terrace by terrace across the roof of the Namba Parks shopping mall.

💡 Fact: It stands where Osaka Stadium used to be, the old home ground of the Nankai Hawks baseball team.

📷 Photo: 663highland / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

---

🥬 Brooklyn Grange — New York City, USA 🇺🇸

Vegetables grow in rows high above the streets on Brooklyn Grange, an organic farm spread across New York rooftops.

💡 Fact: The farm covers 5.6 acres on three rooftops in Brooklyn and Queens. It also keeps more than 40 beehives, the city’s largest apiary, which make about 1,500 pounds (680 kg) of honey a year.

📷 Photo: Paulina Fein / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

More: Strange Finds