NOMADS

Flexible Dwelling System Designed for Modern Nomads

Residential

Urban Design

Assemble

Ideation

When

Sep 2019 - Oct 2019

Who

Individual Project

Project Overview

China's rapid urbanization has resulted in a significant influx of young workers migrating to major cities each year. These individuals, often referred to as "nomads", are unable to afford homeownership, due to the extreme cost have owning a house, they rely heavily on renting. Therefore, this rural-to-urban migration has led to a huge surge in the rental housing market.

There are enumerous reasons can lead to individuals moving to another apartment, rent changes, career switches, leases terminated for whatever reason and etc. As a result, frequently moving from one apartment to another became a nature of these modern nomads. This transient lifestyle strips them of a sense of belonging and identity.

Inspired by Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the project envisions a transformative infrastructure system designed to support these urban nomads. It consists of modular dwelling units—"living machines"—that can be easily assembled within the underutilized spaces of a metropolis. These units enable nomads to retain their homes intact as they relocate and integrate into new systems. This approach not only provides stability and flexibility, while the public spaces on both top and bottom of each structure facilitate the community building aspect of the project through circulation and visual connections existed between residents and locals.

This project aims to empower urban nomads, helping them feel they are not just visitors, but an integral part of the city.

What's the Exisiting Problem?

Enumerous reasons can lead to individuals moving to another apartment, thus moving every couple of months has become a nature of these modern nomads. Which leads to a significant lose of sense of belonging for those who work in metropolitans like Shanghai.

Where the Sense of Belonging Come from?

Referencing to Maslow's theory, Achievement, Physical Environment, and Communication can be three main requirement for humans. While in the context of this project, we translate these three key feature into Commute and Location, Living Units, and Public Space repectively.

You move with your unit.

The Ideation of solution is simple, when residents move to another place, instead of packing up everything they have, they just go there, and the whole unit would be shipped to the new place as a whole, maintaining its old physical appearance and personal belongings, to reduce the lose of sense of belonging.

The Architecture Language

The project is constucted using its own language, from furniture and buildilng elements at the bottom level, to clusters as a whole. Residents participate in the constructing and organizing the system, instead of being allocated into a single unit.

Commute and Location

Long commute and living far from urban life is one key aspect of losing sense of belonging when it comes it living in big cities. Therefore, Instead of placing the project in a specific place, it would become an architecture standing "everywhere".

The project is an aggregation of a lot of small building pieces, plugged into urban enclaves or waste gaps, which offers nomads high flexiblilty to chose the location of their houses, reducing the commute efforts and giving oppotunities to rejoin urban lives.

Living Units

In order to provide same interface across different building elements, abstraction upon them is required. Furnitures and basic building elements defining human behaviors. By abstracting different buildilng elements, the prototype 'Z' raised, a slab twisting at various height and directions implying different type of usages. Which can be composed to more complex building components, with supplyment of other detailed object.

Building Components Examples

Composed Unit Examples

Public Spaces

The top and bottom of each structure are dedicate reserved for public space, to provide space as a whole for improved chance of communication.

While due to the nature of the project, negative space will be left in the structure certainly, they also served as in-between public spaces for residents' casual interaction.

By controlling the height of each structure, and the surface of the public space on the top, a visual connection among different structure got revealed. Which served as a mental connection between the modern nomads stared across the city.

Composed Public Space Examples

From top, neighbouring structures glowing in the city background, the visual connection among them served as a mental sympathy for modern nomads across the city.

From bottom, the public space maintain the accessibity from both side of the street. And lifting living units in the air, providing a sense of lightness and portability.

Building Component Detail

Building Stucture Detail

Community Participation

The project provides a full set of components and syntax, while the operation requires the participation of the entire community.

Each structure started as a bare skeleton, while residents moving in, living units and public space units got inserted onto the structure. Where the unit is located and how it is look like is fully up to residents. As time passing, residents move away with their own units, slots are de-allocated. Structures show an aggregation of residents efforts to build their own community.