Project by Yucheng Niu, Abhishek Patel
The project reimagines collective housing for the emerging class of digital workers, remote professionals, freelancers, and creatives whose work blurs the line between living and working. The project responds to the widespread shift toward remote and hybrid labor since the pandemic, which has redefined the home as both a domestic and professional space. While working from home offers flexibility, it also introduces new spatial and mental health challenges, particularly in compact urban apartments where life and work collapse into a single room. The design begins with the micro-unit but quickly expands beyond efficiency to address the lack of separation and social relief. Through studies of U-shaped typologies, the project evolves into a cluster-based system that emphasizes layered scales of sharing: the unit, the corridor, the terrace, the courtyard, and finally, the street. Each scale introduces opportunities for interaction and transition. The skip-stop corridors become active community streets, terraces alternate between outdoor leisure and enclosed co-working, courtyards host collective activities, and a porous ground plane connects the building to the city. Formally, the project uses rotation, mirroring, and terracing to aggregate clusters, creating a flexible “grid” of communal and private spaces. The architectural frame wraps shared zones, while varied window rhythms respond to program and day-lighting needs. Together, these strategies transform isolated work-from-home life into a collective daily rhythm, offering both boundaries and connections. The ‘Grid’ positions architecture as a tool for designing healthier, more resilient modes of living and working eventually bridging the gap between isolation and community in the age of immaterial labor.
