Bubble Hub: Co-Living Under a Single Dome

A bubble has no walls. It has a surface that encloses a volume, and inside it everything is connected to everything else. Bubble Hub, a co-living project by Tatiana Taratuta and Danil Nazarov, takes this literally. It proposes a single translucent dome containing an entire co-living village: private pods, communal libraries, lounges, workspaces, and public plazas, all under one continuous shell with no corridors and no doors between shared spaces.

The project received an Honorable Mention in the Hustle Hub '19 competition on uni.xyz. It is the most formally radical entry in the series: not a building with rooms, but a single volume with furniture.

The Shell: A Dome on Legs

The exterior is a translucent, organic dome raised above the ground on legs. The form is soft, blobby, and immediately recognisable. It does not look like housing. It looks like a greenhouse, a tent, or a soap bubble that landed in the middle of a city block. The aerial view and site plan show it sitting among conventional urban fabric, occupying a single block footprint.

Raising the dome on legs creates a public ground level beneath it: covered, shaded, and open to the street. The co-living begins above. This separation means the building contributes to the city at ground level (public passage, market space) while housing its community above.

The Interior: No Walls, Only Furniture

The main interior render shows the communal hub beneath the perforated dome shell. The space is open, vast, and softly lit through the dome's triangulated skin. Curved organic seating, a ring sculpture, and informal gathering points replace conventional rooms. People sit, walk, and talk. There are no corridors. There are no partition walls. The space is defined by furniture, level changes, and the curvature of the shell itself.

This is the project's central argument: that co-living works best when the distinction between public and private is spatial rather than physical. You do not close a door to be alone. You move to a quieter zone. You do not open a door to be social. You sit down where people are. The architecture does not enforce behaviour. It offers positions.

Private Pods: Three Typologies

The blue wireframe drawings show the private units. Three pod types are stacked vertically, each containing a bed, kitchen, bathroom, and a curved rooftop terrace. The pods are compact, self-contained, and clearly defined. They are the only enclosed spaces in the building. Everything outside them is shared.

The hourglass-shaped shared module is the counterpart: a double-height communal volume with workstations, soft furniture, and a pinched waist that creates visual separation between upper and lower zones without walls. The shape itself is the partition. This is spatial design at its most inventive: using geometry instead of construction to create different atmospheres within a single open volume.

The Library and the Lounge

The two most developed interior renders show a library and a lounge. The library has curved bookshelves rising to the dome ceiling, a central skylight, and a spiral staircase connecting levels. The lounge has soft seating, a triangulated dome overhead, and residents reading and relaxing across two levels connected by the same spiral stair.

These spaces prove that shared rooms in a co-living building can be extraordinary. The library is not a shelf in a hallway. It is a room that would justify a visit even if you did not live there. The lounge is not a sofa in a lobby. It is a multi-level living room with the spatial quality of a museum atrium. This generosity is what makes the shared model attractive. People give up private living rooms because the communal ones are better.

Why This Project Matters

The Hustle Hub competition received entries that ranged from conventional apartments with shared kitchens to vertical campuses with programme towers. Bubble Hub occupies a different position: it eliminates the building envelope as a series of rooms and replaces it with a single continuous interior. The dome is the room. Everything inside is furniture.

This is not a practical proposal for most sites. But as a spatial provocation, it is the competition's most memorable entry. It asks: what is the minimum number of walls a co-living building actually needs? The answer, according to Bubble Hub, is the walls around your bed. Everything else can be open.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Tatiana Taratuta, Danil Nazarov

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

If radical co-living, dome architecture, or the elimination of conventional room boundaries is the kind of thinking you want to explore, uni.xyz runs competitions year-round that reward spatial provocation.

Project credits: Bubble Hub by Tatiana Taratuta and Danil Nazarov. Honorable Mention, Hustle Hub '19 (uni.xyz).