Free modular unit: Timber-Framed Boxes That Divide a Site into Fixed and Shifting Ground

Most masterplans decide where people belong before anyone arrives. This one starts with a box, slices it diagonally, turns the pieces and joins them again, and then leaves room for the people inside to finish the job. The architecture is a set of rules for combination rather than a finished object, and the most important rule is that some parts never move while others never stop moving.

Free modular unit is the work of Mengyang WU and 佳莹 连, set in the United States. The project received Editor's Choice at Liberty Today. The team describes a process of combining and splicing modular units, together with the interaction between people and space, through which users "gradually find their place and role in this space in social interaction." Combinations change with user needs and fall into two categories: fixed areas and non-fixed areas.

One Box, Cut on the Bias, Becomes a Family of Rooms

The generating diagram works like a grammar lesson. A plain rectangular volume is cut along a diagonal, producing wedge and trapezoid pieces; these are rotated and pressed against each other into L shapes, zigzags and broad paired forms. The words "Build connections between units" run across the drawing and repeat, "units, units, units," which works as a reminder that the project's subject is the joint rather than the object.

One unit lifts off the grid as a timber frame, showing what the pale glazed boxes become when built. The diagonal cut matters spatially: two orthogonal boxes would meet along a flat wall, while the angled faces open wedge-shaped thresholds where one room slides into the next. This is where the description's "splicing" becomes a real condition at the scale of a doorway.

The Commercial Grid Uses the Old Platform Edge as a Step

In the commercial area plan, the cut and combined units are placed in dashed red clusters along a set of circulation axes marked by arrows and nodes. The board pulls basic shapes, a square grid, diagonal bars and a single trapezoid, out of the existing site pattern and returns them as timber-framed pavilions populated by red figures. One cluster stays open and loosely enclosed, while the other gathers into a dense courtyard block of interlocking cells.

The detail worth noticing sits at the base of the axonometric, where the units straddle a level change. The board states that the height difference between the original platform and the ground is used to give rhythm to the interior and help spaces communicate. Treating an inherited edge as a stair and a seat, instead of leveling it away, is the clearest moment where the modular system reads its site rather than simply sitting on it.

Cubes Stack Inside a Long Building to Stage the Cultural Area

The cultural area changes register. Its board, titled "Narrative scene construction," moves from population analysis and a set of spatial types (a landscape platform, a teahouse, a book bar, a restaurant, a venue, a canopy, an auditorium) to a morphological study in which a single cube multiplies into L shapes, stepped stacks and gridded clusters. A timeline strip ties the scheme to its setting, placing the Statue of Liberty, a terminal train shed and Liberty State Park in sequence.

The floor plans show a long, columned building in a series of altered configurations, and a before and after drawing records how part of the existing structure is reworked. In the site plan, teal cube modules sit inside the grey footprint like furniture inside a hall. These are the fixed areas: a stable frame that holds program, so that the surrounding ground can stay open to change.

A Stepped Terrace That Grows and Shrinks with Its Crowd

The flexible area is where the non-fixed half of the idea takes form. Four patches of small square units are scattered across the plan, and the axonometric turns them into long terraces that rise and fall in what the board calls continuously curved geometry. Red figures gather on the high points and spread along the slopes; the terraces read as seating, landscape and stage at once.

A short sequence on the right explains the logic: sense of rhythm, then fragmentation, then unit abstraction, with a wave reduced to vertical bars and finally to stacked squares. The board states that these units are flexible and movable, increasing or decreasing according to user needs and actual usage. A thin elevation along the bottom shows the resulting silhouette, a low skyline of cubes that can be rebuilt by the people using it.

Why This Project Matters

Flexibility is often promised and rarely drawn with this much discipline. Free modular unit earns the claim by splitting the problem in two: fixed areas provide orientation and program, non-fixed areas provide freedom, and both come from the same family of cut and rotated boxes. Because the vocabulary is shared, a visitor moving from a timber courtyard to a stepped terrace stays inside one coherent system even as the degree of permanence changes.

For a competition named Liberty Today, the argument is pointed. Liberty here is not an empty plaza; it is the ability of users to add, remove and occupy units, and to find their role through social interaction rather than through a fixed plan. The lesson for designers working with large inherited sites is to treat a small, adaptable kit, applied with clear rules about what stays and what moves, as an alternative to a single master gesture.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designers: Mengyang WU, 佳莹 连

Competition and award

Editor's Choice, Liberty Today

Location

United States

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