Hexagonal Affordable Housing: Sliding Trapezoidal Cells That Reconfigure a City Block

What if a building could rearrange itself the way you rearrange furniture? Hexagonal Affordable Housing (HAH) takes that premise literally: 84 trapezoidal housing cells slide in and out of a structural grid like drawers in a dresser, cantilevering over a central plaza, chasing sunlight, and reconfiguring the social geometry of an entire urban block. The result is a mid-rise residential system that refuses to sit still, drawing on Japanese Metabolist thinking and smart energy tech to propose a genuinely kinetic answer to the affordability crisis.

Designed by Andrea Wan, Anurag Jadhav, Katelyn Anderson, and William Ingram, the project received an Honorable Mention in the Plugin Housing Challenge 2020. Sited within a typical San Francisco urban block, HAH confronts the dense metropolitan realities of limited solar access, steep topography, and constrained lot dimensions with a scalable modular grid that can adapt to varying urban densities and community demographics.

A Structural Grid That Breathes

The axonometric drawings reveal the core logic: a rigid structural frame accepts trapezoidal modules that can be pushed, pulled, and cantilevered to reshape the building envelope in real time. Each cell attaches to the grid and slides along tracks, enabling dynamic spatial reconfigurations that maximize daylight exposure for every unit. The exploded diagram peels apart the layered assembly, showing how building components stack above a fully furnished interior, making the relationship between structure and habitation immediately legible.

Rooted in the philosophies of shinchintaisha, the Metabolist movement's vision of architecture as a living organism, HAH updates that mid-century ambition with contemporary fabrication and energy technology. The scalable grid means the system is not locked to one site or one density; it can stretch to meet the demands of different neighborhoods, lot sizes, and community profiles.

Seventy Square Meters of Adaptable Living

The cutaway axonometric slices into a single trapezoidal module, exposing the timber furniture, metal staircase, and loft bed that define each 70-square-meter double-occupancy unit. Designed for young professionals, students, and first-time cohabiting couples, the interior minimizes partition walls in favor of fluid, open configurations. A home office, fully equipped kitchen, and lounge occupy the lower level, while the loft maximizes the high ceilings created by the trapezoidal geometry. Large window panels flood the space with light, and the absence of rigid room divisions means residents can reshape their unit as their lives change.

Borrowed Light and Cultural Memory

HAH's lighting strategy carries a narrative charge. The Chinese idiom zuo bi tou guang tells of a scholar who carved a hole in a wall to study by a neighbor's light. That story becomes a design feature: shared triangular lightboxes, powered by rooftop solar panels, sit between adjacent units. Translucent panels resembling Japanese washi paper diffuse natural light through angular openings into interior spaces, reducing electricity consumption while giving the architecture a warm, paper-lantern glow. The interior view captures a figure standing in precisely this condition, bathed in angular daylight that enters from above and to the side.

Smart sensors regulate both interior and exterior lighting in response to daylight levels and occupancy, while photovoltaic cells integrated across the façade generate the renewable energy that powers the kinetic sliding mechanism itself. Each module's ability to reposition exposes its photovoltaic surfaces to optimal sunlight throughout the day, creating a feedback loop where the building's movement directly improves its energy harvest. The workspace nook beneath the angled skylight, with a rooftop solar panel visible just above, makes this loop tangible at the scale of a single desk.

A Plaza Without Lawns

At ground level, the project organizes itself around a central plaza paved in concrete with tree-lined seating areas. The deliberate absence of lawns is a water conservation strategy consistent with the building's broader environmental ethos. In a city where every drop counts, replacing turf with hardscape and canopy shade is both a practical and political gesture, signaling that affordable housing and ecological responsibility are not competing priorities.

Why This Project Matters

HAH operates at an intersection that most modular housing proposals avoid: kinetic building systems, net-zero energy ambitions, and cultural storytelling. The sliding mechanism is not a gimmick; it directly improves solar performance, spatial variety, and daylight quality. And by grounding the design in literary and architectural traditions from East Asia, the team gives the project a depth of reference that elevates it beyond a purely technical exercise.

As a prototype for affordable mid-rise living, Hexagonal Affordable Housing suggests that adaptability does not have to come at the expense of identity. Each 70-square-meter unit is small enough to be genuinely affordable and large enough to feel generous, while the building's constant physical reconfiguration ensures that no two days on the block look exactly the same. For a housing crisis defined by rigidity, sameness, and scarcity, that kind of dynamism is exactly what is needed.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Andrea Wan, Anurag Jadhav, Katelyn Anderson, William Ingram

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Project credits: Hexagonal Affordable Housing (HAH) by Andrea Wan, Anurag Jadhav, Katelyn Anderson, William Ingram Plugin Housing Challenge 2020 (uni.xyz).