Hierarchy Towers: Vertical Co-Living in Singapore Built on a Gradient from Private to Public

Most residential towers are vertical filing cabinets: identical units stacked behind a lobby, with community left to the elevator ride. Hierarchy Towers rejects that model at its root. Instead of treating a high-rise as a pile of isolated apartments, the project organises life around a sequence of social scales. These run from the private room to the neighbourhood cluster, from the shared workplace to the communal floor, and finally to programs that open to the whole city. The argument is clear: remote work and digital life have blurred the line between living and working, yet people still need spontaneous encounters, shared experience and a sense of belonging, and architecture has to build that deliberately.

Designed by Gennadiy Kraev and recognised as an Editor's Choice entry in NomadHouse 2020, the proposal sits on a relatively flat, roughly square parcel of about 175 by 168 metres in Singapore, accessible from all four sides. Its wider context reads like a postcard of the city's ambitions: Marina Bay Sands, Marina One, the Marina Bay Financial Centre, the ArtScience Museum and Gardens by the Bay. Housing, offices, coworking, health services, recreation, retail and cultural facilities are gathered into one vertical development, so residents can meet daily needs without crossing the city.

Staggered Slabs That Let Vegetation Do the Talking

Up close, the towers read as a stack of shifting concrete floor plates, each edge softened by trailing ferns and shrubs. The glazing behind reflects water and neighbouring towers, so the building partly absorbs its surroundings rather than standing apart from them. This is where the project's view of sustainability becomes tangible. Planting is not applied as a green veneer; it lives on the overhangs created by the stagger, where each slab shades the one below it.

Kraev's environmental analysis of solar movement, prevailing winds, surrounding greenery and waterfront conditions informs the orientation of these planted terraces. In a tropical city that already brands itself through landscape, the move feels local rather than generic: the terraces belong to a Singaporean conversation about how greenery and density can coexist.

A Silhouette Built from Rotation, Not Height

Looking up past an ivy-covered wall, the towers twist as they rise, their stacked volumes rotating against a pale sky. From the water, the twin profiles show planted terraces and glazed sky bridges strung between them. The project does not try to outdo Marina Bay through sheer height. Its identity comes from rotated volumes, projecting communal blocks, planted edges and layered horizontal platforms.

That restraint is smart. In a skyline full of record-chasing landmarks, a tower that stands out through articulation instead of altitude makes its social programme visible on the facade. The projecting blocks and bridges are not decoration; they mark the communal layers where the hierarchy of shared space actually happens.

The Sky Bridge as a Shared Neighbourhood

The section makes the strategy legible. Three towers rise from a podium planted with trees, each organised around a central core, and a planted sky bridge links all three at height. The bridge is the spatial expression of the project's central idea of social gradation. Private zones occupy the towers, while the connecting level becomes a communal ground lifted into the air, a place where residents of different towers can cross paths without returning to the street.

This vertical distribution of private, semi-public, communal and public zones produces a network rather than a strict separation of functions. Kraev avoids the trap of the gated enclave: the hierarchy widens gradually, so a neighbourly conversation and a citywide event each have an appropriate place within the same structure.

A Podium That Hands the Ground Back to the City

The elevation shows the full composition: three stacked towers joined by a long planted bridge, standing above an ivy-screened podium, with level markers running along both sides. The podium completes the social gradient at street level. With the site open on all four sides, the base serves as the most public layer of the hierarchy, where the city-facing programmes meet the surrounding urban fabric.

Read from bottom to top, the drawing works as a diagram of decreasing publicness, interrupted by the bridge where community briefly takes priority over privacy again. That rhythm, rather than any single gesture, is the project's strongest architectural decision.

Why This Project Matters

Hierarchy Towers treats sustainability as a social question as much as an environmental one. By putting work, health, recreation and culture within reach of home, it reduces unnecessary movement across the city. By designing a gradient of shared spaces, it gives digital-era residents a reason to meet in person. The planting and environmental analysis matter, but the lasting contribution is the idea that a tower can be built as a sequence of communities rather than a stack of units.

For a competition centred on nomadic, flexible living, Kraev's entry provides a useful counterweight: the more mobile and connected people become, the more they need well-calibrated places to belong. His Editor's Choice recognition at NomadHouse 2020 reflects a proposal that turns that need into section, elevation and silhouette.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Gennadiy Kraev

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Project credits: Hierarchy Towers by Gennadiy Kraev NomadHouse 2020 (uni.xyz).