Living in the Cocoon: Four Planted Domes Where Hanging Bowls Turn Strangers Into Neighbours

Most dwelling proposals begin with a bed and work outward. This one begins with a crowd. From above it reads as four white spheres punched full of round holes, each hole sprouting shrubs, clustered so tightly on a lawn that they almost touch. Step inside and the floor gives way to hanging bowls, each big enough for a handful of people, each lit from beneath and roofed by a mop of broad leaves. The question it puts to the brief is blunt: what if home is less a private room and more a place to sit with others?

Living in the Cocoon is the work of Julia Janiszewska, entered in Dwell One, where it received the People's Choice Award. The project's own description is a single, unambiguous sentence: the Cocoons area is primarily a place created for society, where you can meet new people, come with your friends and neighbours, and enjoy being together. Everything that follows is an attempt to give that sentence a shape.

Four Perforated Shells Gathered Around a Small Core

The plan is almost diagrammatic. Four domes sit in a square, and at the point where they nearly meet a small round element marks the shared centre. The shells are not sealed: dozens of circular openings pierce each one, and planting pushes up through them, so the roofscape reads as a garden as much as a building. Seen from directly overhead, the white geometry and the green growth are woven together rather than layered.

The site plans run the same cluster through four seasons: bare branches on fresh grass, a frosted monochrome winter, full summer canopy and an autumn of yellowing trees. It is a useful move. The domes stay constant while the landscape around them shifts, which frames the building as a fixed social anchor inside a changing park rather than an object competing with it.

Vine Columns Above, a Shared Table Below

In section the domes lift off the ground on glazed walls lined with columns wrapped in hanging vines, so the facade becomes a screen of green strands rather than a solid edge. Beneath the lawn, a basement room holds a long white table under a sculptural lattice that drops through from the floor above. The boards describe this lower level as a place for having meals together, and the vertical stacking is clear: activity and movement up top, a quieter communal table below.

The upper levels are not passive either. One rendering looks through the glazing at two people on exercise bikes, the dome's planted openings directly above them and willow leaves in the foreground. Placed beside a pond, with a cyclist and a figure on a rock at the water's edge, the pavilions read as a park building people drift into, not a house with a front door.

Three Coloured Bands, Three Ways of Being Together

The interior is organised around suspended bowls distinguished by a single band of colour. The Green Cocoon is framed on its board as a space for rest, to sit with friends or meet new ones. The Grey Cocoon is pitched as the livelier option, somewhere to arrive alone and leave with company. The Yellow Cocoon carries a small bookcase and invites visitors to read, talk about books and leave one behind for the next person.

The colour coding is simple, but it does real work. Rather than dividing the plan into rooms, the project divides it into moods, each held in an identical object. A visitor chooses a bowl the way you might choose a table in a cafe, by the atmosphere already inside it. Each board pairs the interior with a small inset of the exterior, keeping the pod and the pavilion legible as one idea.

Bowls That Float Under a Ceiling of Moss

The most memorable spatial decision is that nobody sits on the floor. Each bowl hovers above a green carpet, held by slender angled struts, its underside glowing so that it appears to float. Ladders lead up into some of them. Overhead, a dark moss ceiling is cut with round lit openings, and from each one a cluster of large leaves spills down over the bowl. The concept boards trace this to an analysis of the feeling of safety, drawing on the curled position of a fetus and the shape of an egg, with the leaves meant to create the illusion of a dome.

The effect, in the renderings, is of enclosure without walls. Three people sit in the green bowl with their backs to a continuous rim; a woman and child share the yellow one at dusk, a ladder resting against its edge. Each pod is a room you can see out of and into, which is precisely the tension the project wants: privacy measured by a curved lip, not by a door.

A Social Machine on the Edge of a Pond

Where the project is strongest it is also most exposed. In the Grey Cocoon a group stands around the rim with bottles set on its edge, and out on the lawn the twin vine-draped domes face a pond, a willow, pigeons and visitors in low evening light. These images describe a public pavilion with great clarity. They describe a dwelling less clearly. Shuhei Aoyama, who judged the competition, put his finger on exactly this gap, admiring the form while questioning whether it reads as a place to live and for whom.

Impressive shape, and bustling interior space. But the whole structure more looks like landscape furniture in park or amusement park attractions, not like space of living. And it looks this house more suitable for families or co-living, not look like suitable for single person living.Shuhei Aoyama, Founder & Director Architect, B.L.U.E. Architecture Studio, China

The critique is fair, and it is also a key to reading the project honestly. Its own stated aim is society: meeting, gathering, sharing. Judged as a home for one, it is overgenerous; judged as an argument that living alone might depend on a place to be with others, it becomes more interesting. A companion piece, Living in the Cocoon, looks more closely at the three cocoons.

Why This Project Matters

Living in the Cocoon is not a refined housing solution, and it does not pretend to be. Its value lies in reframing the question. Instead of shrinking the private unit, it invests in the shared one, and it gives that shared space an unusual spatial grammar: suspended bowls, coloured by mood, sheltered by leaves rather than walls, stacked above a common table. The People's Choice Award suggests that image landed with an audience, and it is easy to see why.

What remains open is the step from pavilion to dwelling, the point the jury pressed on. That unresolved edge is worth keeping in view. Projects that make the social life around a home as tangible as the home itself are rarer than they should be, and this one shows, with real conviction, how a curved rim and a canopy of leaves can make strangers comfortable sitting side by side.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designer: Julia Janiszewska

Competition and award

People's Choice Award, Dwell One

Jury

Shuhei Aoyama, Founder & Director Architect, B.L.U.E. Architecture Studio, China

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