Moving "Rubik's Cube": Stilted Color Blocks That Give the Homeless an Address and a Neighborhood

Most housing for people without homes is designed to be overlooked: grey, uniform and quietly tucked out of sight. This proposal does the opposite. It paints every unit a different color, lifts it off the ground and scatters it across an open field so that anyone passing by has to look. The bet is that visibility, handled with care, can do more for dignity than discretion ever has.

Moving "Rubik's Cube" is the work of Yinuo Lu, chengyan lian and Jiayue Liu, affiliated with the university Capital Normal University, 2018 and the organization 3L, 2018. Sited at Matia Garo Para Pt-II, India, the project received Editor's Choice at Strata 2020. Its brief to itself is direct: self-sufficient accommodation and shared space for homeless people, built on the logic of low-cost housing, and arranged to break the prejudice that keeps residents and their neighbors apart.

A Palette Deployed as a Social Argument

The team states plainly that color is there to bring people good hope, and the renderings commit to that idea without hedging. Ochre, salmon, sky blue and lemon yellow alternate from one box to the next, so no two neighbors share a facade. That variation does practical work as well as emotional work. In a settlement of near-identical volumes, color becomes the address, the landmark and the thing a child points to when saying "that one is ours."

The textured, plaster-like finish on each block keeps the palette from reading as plastic. These houses look handmade and slightly weathered, closer to a hill village than to an emergency camp, and that register matters for a project whose stated goal is a home that feels secure and respectful rather than temporary.

Houses That Stand on Stilts and Leave the Ground to Everyone

Almost every unit floats on slender legs above the gravel, with thin decks stepping out from the doorways. Raising the boxes frees the strip beneath and around them as shaded, continuous ground, so the space between homes never collapses into leftover alleys. Some volumes stack into two-storey forms with an upper box cantilevered over the lower one, and the shifted massing produces the irregular, rotated silhouette that gives the project its name.

At eye level the effect is a lane that feels porous. Views run under the houses as well as between them, and the low decks act as thresholds where a resident can sit half inside and half in public. That in-between zone is where the project's ambition for a sense of belonging and participation starts to take spatial form.

Red Masts Turn Open Gravel Into Shared Rooms

Threaded through the cluster is a second system: tall red masts with cable stays carrying sail-like tensile canopies. They mark out the shared space the brief calls for without enclosing it. Each canopy throws a pool of shade onto the gravel, creating an outdoor room that belongs to no single household. The red ties the multicolored houses together visually while signalling clearly where the common ground lies.

Alongside the houses sits a different kind of building: a green volume with angled walls and large glazed panes, clearly public in character. Its transparency is the opposite of the small-windowed homes, and its placement at the edge of a lane suggests a shared facility that residents and visitors can both see into. It is the clearest architectural statement of the team's aim to establish friendly relations between people.

A Village That Faces the Road Instead of Hiding From It

From above, the settlement reads as a dense, tightly woven carpet of boxes bounded by a road on one side and a lawn on the other. There is no perimeter wall. The houses press right up to the gravel edge, and the canopies punctuate the plan at regular intervals so that shade and gathering are distributed rather than centralized. Seen from a distance across an open plain, the cluster becomes a bright, legible object in the landscape, with figures streaming toward it.

That openness is the project's strongest decision. A settlement meant to break the prejudice of people toward the vagrant cannot do so if outsiders never walk through it. By keeping the edges permeable and the common spaces visible, the design treats neighbors as future visitors rather than as a threat to be screened out.

Why This Project Matters

Low-cost housing for homeless people is usually judged on how many beds it delivers and how cheaply. Moving "Rubik's Cube" accepts the low-cost premise but refuses to let it flatten the result. Stilts, color and shared canopies are inexpensive moves, yet together they produce something rare in this typology: a place with identity, where each household is distinct and the space between homes is designed with as much intent as the homes themselves.

Its larger lesson is that social integration is a spatial problem before it is a policy one. A settlement that is open at its edges, generous in its common ground and confident enough to be seen gives residents a reason to step outside and gives neighbors a reason to step in. The renderings leave questions of construction and operation open, but the argument they make about dignity through visibility is one more housing designers should be willing to test.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designers: Yinuo Lu, chengyan lian, Jiayue Liu
University: Capital Normal University, 2018
Organization: 3L, 2018

Competition and award

Editor's Choice, Strata 2020

Location

Matia Garo Para Pt-II, India

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