Linked Freedom: A Vertical Nomad Community Where the Homes Themselves Move

In a typical high rise, people move while apartments stay put. Linked Freedom reverses that. Its residential modules travel through a large structural and cable network, so a home can change its neighbours, its view and its distance from the office without being dismantled. The proposal treats movement as a way of life rather than a mechanical feature, and the whole building is organised to accommodate that idea.

Designed by Mahsa Javadi, Amir Hossein Rezaei, Mounes Sherafati and Hanieh Saremi, the project was a Shortlisted entry in NomadHouse 2020. The team designed it for digital nomads: movable homes, communal facilities, flexible interiors, coworking floors and an active public ground plane, all arranged around a street the site may one day carry.

Ground Plates That Fold Upward into a Tower

The team starts with gesture. At ground level, large surfaces seem to lift out of the landscape and fold upward into a grass-covered mound, which becomes a fluid base for the towers. The render shows the effect clearly: a soft, climbable topography below and a gridded cube of coloured pods suspended above. The folded plates express a desire to climb, gather and rise, and they connect the paved plaza to the vertical life overhead.

The strategy separates fixed infrastructure from movable habitation. The frame and the landscape are permanent, while the pods are not. That split is the central argument of the scheme. Because the tower is never a static stack of identical units, its silhouette changes as residents reposition themselves.

Two Volumes Straddling a Street That Doesn't Exist Yet

The site strategy takes a planning possibility, a future street through the centre of the plot, and designs around it. The building splits into two principal volumes on either side of the route. Bridges, shared floors, structural elements and communal programmes tie them together, a relationship legible in the aerial view's H-shaped rooftop. The street is not just an access route. It becomes an urban artery running beneath and through the complex.

At ground level, slender columns rise past the floor plates beside the grassed slope, and people sit on the steps while pods hang overhead. The lower surfaces stretch across the site like broad canopies, recalling the temporary shelters of mobile cultures. Traffic, pedestrians, public activity and building circulation share the same ground, so the tower collects the city's movement beneath it instead of turning away from it.

A Three-Dimensional Frame Where Homes Travel Like Cable Cars

The kinetic housing system is the core of the project. Small residential units hang within a white steel grid, and their movement resembles cabins on a transit line. The motion-blurred orange streaks in this close view make the point plainly: these are homes in transit. Residents could move their unit closer to particular services, workspaces, communities, views or social groups, so the address becomes a choice that can be revised.

This gives the building an unusual job. It works less like a container of apartments and more like a coordinated network that homes plug into and travel through. Yellow, teal and orange pods tucked between the tower floors suggest a collage of households whose arrangement is always provisional, which is a fitting spatial description of nomadic community.

Compact Interiors That Unfold on Demand

A home that moves has to be small, and a small home has to work hard. The four-panel interior sequence shows a wall unit folding open into a bed, so one compact room shifts between daytime and night-time use. The flexibility outside the pod is repeated inside it. Through the night windows, other pods are visible nearby, a reminder that this private room is one part of a larger, shifting neighbourhood.

Coworking Floors Framed by Passing Pods

For digital nomads, work is part of the daily routine, so it is part of the programme. The fixed floors hold open coworking environments with low-partition desks under curving LED ceiling strips. The low partitions keep sightlines open across the floor, and the curved lighting echoes the fluid gestures of the ground plane.

The most telling detail is the band of coloured pods visible through the office windows. Work and home sit in direct visual relation, and in principle a resident could move their pod up against the floor where they work. The shared facilities give the moving community a stable centre, which explains why the project sets permanent communal floors alongside its mobile units.

Why This Project Matters

Many nomad housing proposals stop at the portable unit: a capsule, a trailer, a kit of parts. Linked Freedom asks what kind of building could host that mobility at urban density. Its answer, a permanent frame with travelling homes, separates infrastructure from habitation in a way that recalls the megastructure experiments of the 1960s while focusing on present-day remote workers. Building a cable network for housing would raise serious engineering questions, but as a speculative position the proposal is clear and consistent.

The project's strongest decision may be its urban one. By letting a future street pass through the site and lifting the tower over it, the team links individual freedom of movement with the city's own circulation. Homes move overhead, people and traffic move below, and the folded landscape connects the two. That makes the entry a case for architecture that coordinates movement instead of fixing people in place.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Mahsa Javadi, Amir Hossein Rezaei, Mounes Sherafati, Hanieh Saremi

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Project credits: Linked Freedom by Mahsa Javadi, Amir Hossein Rezaei, Mounes Sherafati, Hanieh Saremi NomadHouse 2020 (uni.xyz).