2030 Buzz Haus: A Triangular Tower Grown from Three Axes for Singapore's Digital Nomads

Most housing for remote workers still starts from the apartment and adds a desk. 2030 Buzz Haus starts from the opposite end. It assumes that by 2030 the digital nomad will not need a flat with an office nearby, but an environment where living, working, recreation, mobility and community overlap. Its answer is a modular framework organised around two principles, flexibility and connectivity, and the project treats them as the logic the whole scheme grows from rather than features added afterwards.

Designed by Felix Leung and Hoi Ching Cheng, the proposal was recognised as an Editor's Choice entry in NomadHouse 2020. Set in Singapore, it combines a residential tower with a wider urban framework that can grow, change and connect to future districts. The designers sum up the atmosphere they want with a refrain, "Buzz Buzz Buzz": a community that is active, collaborative, mobile and always changing. The bee in their diagrams makes the hive metaphor explicit.

Three Axes That Become a Ground Plan and Then a Tower

The concept diagram reads like an assembly sequence: axes, entrances, structure, tower, terminals and modules, each drawn on its own hexagonal panel. The three axes are living, working and future. Living covers domestic life, leisure, community and wellbeing. Working holds collaboration, experimentation and knowledge exchange. Future reaches past the site boundary toward new mobility systems and later phases of urban development. These are not just labels. The lines set out the site's ground network, and where they converge, the structure lifts off the landscape grid and becomes a 28-storey tower.

This is the scheme's strongest move. The triangular footprint is not a stylistic choice imposed on a brief; it records the meeting point of three programmes. At ground level the landscape rises at the three corners to form separate entrances, so the building can be approached from several directions. The tower reads as something that emerges from the site's circulation and structure, not an object dropped onto it.

Hexagonal Lounges and a Moss-Lined Core

Inside, the programme is organised as a continuous vertical journey. Reception, a restaurant and activity spaces occupy the lower floors, creating a public base where residents, visitors and neighbours can meet. Co-working floors sit above, with workspaces ranging from open collaborative zones to quieter discussion areas and individual desks, and conference facilities above those. The lounge render shows how the hive geometry carries down to furniture scale: hexagonal blue and grey seating clusters around small tables under a round ceiling opening, with a planted terrace beyond the glazing.

The second interior is more striking. A conical core covered in moss rises inside a diagonal lattice, with a curved ramp and planter beds catching daylight. It turns the building's vertical spine into a shared green room, a place you pass through as you move between floors. For a tower that stacks studios, apartments, offices and leisure, a core you experience as space rather than as lifts and shafts helps tie the programme together.

Timber Cabins and an Amphitheatre on the Modular Landscape

At ground level the scale drops sharply. A path lined with small timber-clad cabins and shrubs leads toward the diamond-glazed tower, setting a fine-grained, low-rise layer against the vertical mass. Nearby, an amphitheatre with arched white canopy ribs and curved stepped seating faces a green hillside dotted with more cabins. Together they show the modular landscape as more than leftover plaza: it is a second inhabited layer with its own spaces for gathering.

This pairing matters for the nomad brief. A tower alone tends to keep people in their own units and floors. The cabins and the amphitheatre give the community somewhere to meet outdoors in the open, which supports the project's claim that connectivity is social as well as spatial.

Pools, Pavilions and a Gravel Plaza at the Tower's Foot

The leisure landscape is laid out as a gravel plaza with pools, timber pavilions and palms, with the tower rising directly behind. The render is useful because it shows the relationship the designers care about: the building is never out of view, yet the ground plane offers a slower, resort-like counterpoint to the co-working floors above. Recreation sits next to work rather than a commute away.

A Timber Spiral That Links Lounge, Climbing Wall and Terrace

Seen from above, a curved timber spiral staircase wraps a sunken circular lounge, with a climbing wall and glazed terrace alongside. It brings play, circulation and rest into one compact space, and its timber links it to the pavilions outside. The final exterior view repeats the theme: pyramidal-roofed timber pavilions among shallow pools and palms, set against the faceted glass tower.

That material continuity is easy to miss, but it does real work. Warm timber at human scale, both inside and on the ground, softens the glass tower and suggests that the parts belong to one habitat rather than separate developments sharing a site.

Why This Project Matters

Many competition entries about remote work end up as a housing block with a shared office on the ground floor. Leung and Cheng begin with the city instead. By deriving the tower's triangular form, its three entrances and its landscape grid from the living, working and future axes, they make a convincing argument that flexibility can be built into the plan itself. The future axis, reaching toward mobility systems and later urban phases, gives the scheme a growth logic that most single-building proposals lack.

The next questions are practical: how the modules adapt over time, and how a 28-storey stack holds onto the closeness of a hive as it fills. Even so, the project points somewhere worth going. It treats the digital nomad as a member of a community that needs ground, greenery and shared rooms as much as bandwidth, and it gives that community an architecture that keeps changing along with its residents.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Felix Leung, Hoi Ching Cheng

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Project credits: 2030 Buzz Haus by Felix Leung, Hoi Ching Cheng NomadHouse 2020 (uni.xyz).