Fourth Place: A Reconfigurable Tower Where Home, Work and Leisure Stop Being Separate Floors

Sociologists have long split everyday life into three places: the home, the workplace, and the café, club or library where people gather informally. Remote work has blurred those lines, and Fourth Place starts from that observation. The project argues that the three categories have already merged in practice for anyone working from a laptop between cities, and it asks what a building would look like if it stopped pretending otherwise. Its answer is a skyscraper that behaves less like a stack of identical floors and more like a framework that can be rearranged.

Designed by Wang Zhiyue, the proposal was shortlisted in NomadHouse 2020, a competition about housing for digital nomads. The scheme imagines a vertical community where residents can live, work, socialise and move between cities while keeping a sense of belonging. Residential, working and communal modules attach to a permanent structural core, and the mix can change to suit both the inhabitants and the surrounding urban context.

A Fixed Core, a Shifting Skin of Pods, and Six Steps to Move In

The opening axonometric sets out the project's main architectural rule: cylindrical cores stay put while faceted pods gather around them in uneven clusters. The tower's silhouette is therefore never complete. It reads as a record of who is living there at a given moment, and that is a sharp counterpoint to the uniform floor plates of a conventional apartment block.

Beside the tower, a six-step check-in diagram shows that occupancy here is a process rather than a lease. Through digital interfaces, residents choose a nomad community, enter a coliving block, customise their modules, pick a residential location, and identify coworking or communal spaces. Placing this sequence next to the building drawing matters. It treats the user interface as part of the architecture and turns occupants into participants in how the building develops.

Coliving, Coworking, Commingling: Three Hybrids Instead of Three Places

The exploded module diagrams translate the theory into a working catalogue. Coliving combines home and work, coworking combines work and leisure, and commingling combines home and leisure. Each unit is drawn with its furniture, figures and function icons, and dotted lines connect them to show that no module stands alone. The fourth place is what appears when all three hybrids sit inside one system.

The strength of this sheet is its restraint. Rather than proposing a single all-purpose room, the project keeps the categories legible and lets residents combine them according to their work habits, social expectations and length of stay. In this scheme, modularity is less a construction method than a way of managing relationships that keep changing.

From Sleeping Nook to Lounge Pit: The Interior at Body Scale

The illustrated sections bring the system down to the scale of the body. A sleeping nook, a private desk, a shared worktable, a sunken lounge pit and a terrace stair follow one another in sequence, so the shift from solitary work to group activity happens through section rather than through corridors and doors. This is how the coliving logic plays out in practice: residents who work irregular hours can move from rest to concentration to company without leaving the vertical community.

The skateboarder passing at night is a small but telling detail. It suggests that the tower's public edges are meant to be used casually and after hours, which is exactly what a third place needs in order to work, and what most residential high-rises lack.

Towers as Nodes in a Coastal Network

Zooming out, the map-based diagram places the building within a chain of connected nodes along a coastline. Three tall towers are colour-coded for residential, business and cultural districts, which shows that the module mix is meant to respond to the surrounding urban context. A tower in a business district could lean towards coworking, while one in a cultural quarter could favour commingling.

This is where the nomad brief becomes urban rather than purely architectural. Moving between cities becomes moving between linked nodes of one community, and that is how the project tries to give a mobile population the sense of belonging that a single address used to provide.

Reading the Stack: Plan Types Mapped Floor by Floor

The final isometric breaks a slender tower into separate columns: structure, co-living, co-working and co-mingling, each assigned its own range of floors and plan type. Pulling the layers apart makes the logic easy to check. The structure is permanent, and the programme layers can each be adjusted independently over time.

This diagram also tests the proposal's claim most directly. It shows that the fourth place is not one blended room but a coordinated vertical arrangement in which distinct functions stay close enough together that residents experience them as one continuous environment.

Why This Project Matters

Many proposals for digital nomads stop at a furnished micro-unit with good Wi-Fi. Fourth Place goes further by questioning the typology itself. It treats the skyscraper as a support structure with interchangeable content and builds a clear framework, the three hybrids, so that flexibility is organised rather than formless. Because the check-in sequence, the module catalogue and the stacking diagram all follow from the same idea, the scheme holds together across scales.

Its lasting value lies in the questions it raises for any housing designed around mobility. Who decides how a building is configured, how a temporary resident becomes part of a community, and how a tower can respond to its district instead of ignoring it? Wang Zhiyue's entry does not settle every technical question about moving modules around a core, but it offers a clear and well-argued model for a way of life that conventional floor plans have yet to accommodate.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Wang Zhiyue

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Project credits: Fourth Place by Wang Zhiyue NomadHouse 2020 (uni.xyz).