Customized Instant City Module Operating System: A Second, Movable City Above Barcelona's Eixample

Most urban renewal plans begin with a bulldozer. This one begins with a question about software: what if a city could be patched, updated and reconfigured the way an operating system is, without wiping the hardware underneath? Customized Instant City Module Operating System answers by treating architecture as a continuously adjustable infrastructure rather than a stock of finished buildings. Housing expands, public space shifts, circulation reorganizes and modules travel between locations as demand changes, while Barcelona's historic fabric stays active below.

Designed by Wanzhu Jiang and jiaqi wang, the proposal received an Organizer's Choice Award in Hyperblock. It is framed as a renewal strategy for the Eixample district between 2020 and 2050, and it rests on a clear position: the Cerdà grid carries too much cultural value to erase, yet conventional construction is too slow and too permanent to keep pace with changing lifestyles. The designers' answer is a second, flexible urban layer that occupies the city's underused territories, including the air above streets, rooftops, courtyards and underground zones, which the project treats as urban reserves.

A Lattice Tower Rising Behind the Street, Not in Place of It

The opening collage sets the tone with deliberate deadpan. A man in a suit stands among parked cars on an ordinary street while a lattice tower climbs behind a stack of white cubes. Nothing at ground level has been removed; the new city simply appears above and behind the old one. That juxtaposition is the project's whole argument compressed into a single frame: growth by addition, not substitution.

The image also shows why the designers chose the Eixample. Their site analysis moves from city and district down to streets, blocks, courtyards and individual elements, mapping road networks, transport, climate, population mobility, cultural diversity and energy fluctuations. The regular grid gives them a predictable framework to plug into. The lattice reads less as a building than as scaffolding for future decisions, a structure that holds space in reserve until the city needs it.

Stairs, Lifts and Frames Designed as Plug-In Hardware

At the scale of the body, the proposal gets surprisingly concrete. A model photograph shows a curving stair canopy, paired with a 1:200 section that locates escalators, an elevator and an equipment room. This is the vertical link between the existing street and the new elevated layer, and treating it as a sculpted, sheltered threshold rather than a utilitarian shaft matters: it is the moment where residents decide whether the upper city feels like public ground or a private add-on.

The component sheet that follows explains how the lattice actually works. Exploded axonometrics break the frame into parts, surrounded by plans, a facade, a section and circuit diagrams. The inclusion of wiring logic alongside structural drawings is telling. The frame is not just a load-bearing grid but a carrier for data and power, the physical layer through which the operating system senses and responds. It is the closest thing the project has to a motherboard.

A Transport System That Moves Rooms, Not Just People

This sheet is where post-metabolism stops being a theoretical label and becomes a mechanism. Exploded diagrams separate traffic floors, steering floors, sliding components and magnetic mechanisms, describing the system that relocates modules through the lattice. The Metabolists of the 1960s imagined capsules that could be swapped out over decades; here the designers propose something closer to logistics, with units sliding and turning through the structure according to real-time requirements.

The ambition is high and the engineering remains speculative, but the drawings take the problem seriously enough to separate movement into layers: one for travel, one for changing direction, one for the sliding interface itself. That clarity is what keeps the proposal from sliding into pure image-making. Whether or not magnetic tracks ever carry apartments above Barcelona, the diagram makes a convincing case that mobility should be designed into the frame from the start rather than retrofitted later.

One Day in a City That Rearranges Itself

The storyboard is the most disarming sheet in the set. Comic-style panels follow a man through his day, set beside a floor plan diagram and a night view of stacked units. By narrating the system through one ordinary routine, the designers shift the conversation from megastructure to daily life: how a person wakes, moves, works and returns home inside an environment that is quietly reconfiguring around him. It is a smart corrective to a genre that usually forgets inhabitants exist.

The night render then shows what that life might feel like at full density. People cross walkways between stacked glass and metal cubes, a glass elevator rises through the frame and white cube towers stand beneath a crescent moon. The atmosphere is closer to a lively vertical neighbourhood than a machine. Walkways become the new streets, and the glazed units keep the activity visible, which suggests the designers understand that an elevated city only works if it feels occupied.

Museum by Day, Hotel by Night: Programme as a Variable

The final axonometric delivers the project's most provocative claim. A lattice of steel towers and connecting bridges carries pink block volumes labelled museum, city hall and hotel, and the drawing tracks them shifting from day to night. Function is no longer fixed to an address. A civic room can occupy prime position when the city needs it and yield that space to another use hours later.

This is where the sustainability argument becomes sharpest. The project frames sustainable architecture not only as lower energy use but as a smarter use of what already exists, with resources collected, distributed and recycled across the system. A building that sits empty for half the day is wasted material; a module that serves three programmes in a single cycle is not. Architecture here becomes a process rather than a finished object, and the drawing makes that process legible.

Why This Project Matters

Cities facing pressure for housing and amenities tend to choose between preservation and growth. This proposal refuses the choice. By claiming the air, rooftops, courtyards and subsurface of the Eixample as reserves, it shows how density might be added to a protected grid without demolishing it, and by making modules mobile it suggests that the same floor area could serve far more needs over its lifetime.

The project's real contribution is its reframing of the architect's role. Jiang and wang design less a building than the rules, hardware and routines through which a city keeps redesigning itself between 2020 and 2050. Its mechanics are speculative and its governance questions remain open, but as a provocation it lands: if urban demand changes daily, perhaps architectural supply should too.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Wanzhu Jiang, jiaqi wang

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Project credits: Customized Instant City Module Operating System by Wanzhu Jiang, jiaqi wang Hyperblock (uni.xyz).