Neo-Covenant: A Runner-up Settlement Where Returning Spacefarers Meet Lalibela's Underground Survivors

Most visions of the end of the world linger on ruins. Neo-Covenant starts after the ruins, at the moment people come back. The project imagines a civilization returning to Earth after an extinction-level catastrophe. It does not treat the damaged planet as a place to reclaim. It treats it as a place to study. The result is one expandable settlement where energy, food, research, culture, housing, communication and collective memory run as a single system. Architecture here is less a shelter than a working ecosystem.

Designed by Yuwei Shen, MU ZHAOALEX, Shuai Zou and 雅杰 陈, the proposal was named Runner-up in Architecture of the Apocalypse 2020. The team sets their settlement in Lalibela, Ethiopia. In their narrative, the region's rock-hewn churches have become underground refuges for people who stayed on Earth while another group escaped into space. When the two populations meet again, the settlement becomes common ground between two versions of humanity.

A Site Drawn Twice: Ghost Plan Above, Inhabited Ground Below

The paired axonometrics set up the project's main tension. A faint line drawing of the site floats above a dark, rendered version, with a looped plan at the center. It reads like a before-and-after of survival: a world held only in records and memory above, and a hostile surface that must actually be occupied below. This fits the team's scenario. It is a planet worn down by decades of uncontrolled urbanization, fossil-fuel use, pollution and ecosystem loss, then struck by a solar event that leaves radiation, contaminated water, temperature swings and dust storms in its wake.

The presentation board brings that abstraction down to ground level. A cutaway axonometric of the rocky site sits above two perspectives: a sunken shelter entrance and a water channel. These are the conditions the designers say architecture now has to meet. A house is no longer enough, and neither is a city that relies on outside supply chains. The ground itself, cut into and channelled, becomes part of the life-support system.

A Figure-Eight Loop Wired Into Tanks, Pipes and Rock

The top-down site plan shows the settlement's logic. A figure-eight building sits among tanks and pipes, with orange rock on one side of the sheet. The loop works well here. It suggests circulation that returns on itself, much as a closed resource cycle does. The settlement must grow food, process resources, produce energy and purify water within its own boundary. The plumbing is not hidden behind the architecture; it is the architecture.

The section pushes this further. A machine-like structure hangs in water beneath a thin red crust of rock, with small figures on stacked floors. It is the clearest image of the project's two forms of survival. Lalibela's carved, volcanic-rock churches belong to the people who endured on Earth, and the new technical settlement is pressed up against that buried layer. The thin red line between them carries a lot of narrative weight.

Ribbed Towers and Hanging Pods as Instruments of Rediscovery

Flared, ribbed towers linked by sloping walkways, with cylindrical pods hanging from vertical cables: this section shows where Neo-Covenant's programme lives. The brief is long. It includes laboratories, archives, research facilities, housing, greenhouses, energy production, purification infrastructure, communal spaces, launch facilities, communication systems and transportation networks. What stands out is the stance behind that list. The returning generation, many of whom were born away from Earth and know it only through stories, does not assume the old world can be rebuilt. The towers are built for investigation, a vertical apparatus for learning what remains and how to live with it differently.

Glass Domes Strung Across a Barren Surface

The aerial view shows a ribbed glass dome joined by narrow tubes to two smaller domes on a pale oval of rocky ground. It is the most legible picture of how the settlement is meant to grow. The units are discrete and connected, so the settlement can expand as conditions change instead of being fixed at a final size. The ground-level rendering supports this: translucent greenhouse domes and a tubular corridor spread across gravelly, lunar-like terrain under a pale sky.

The aesthetic draws openly on space-colony imagery, and that is the point. These are people coming home with the habits and technologies of off-world life. Placing those domes on Earth, beside a centuries-old sacred landscape, makes the encounter between the two populations physical. The greenhouse becomes a diplomatic object as well as an agricultural one.

Why This Project Matters

Neo-Covenant takes sustainability beyond the building scale. It asks what architecture must do when nothing outside it can be relied on. The designers answer with an artificial ecosystem in which production, purification, research and dwelling cannot be separated. That systemic framing is the project's strongest idea, and it holds up as a way of thinking about resilience well before any apocalypse.

Its other strength is cultural. By anchoring the scheme to Lalibela's rock-hewn churches, the team avoids the empty-planet cliché and gives the future a past. Survival is split between people who went up and people who went down, and the architecture is staged as the place where they meet. The project argues that rebuilding civilization starts with study, memory and negotiation before construction, which is why it stands out among its peers as a Runner-up.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Yuwei Shen, MU ZHAOALEX, Shuai Zou, 雅杰 陈

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Project credits: Architecture of the Apocalypse: Neo-Covenant by Yuwei Shen, MU ZHAOALEX, Shuai Zou, 雅杰 陈 Architecture of the Apocalypse 2020 (uni.xyz).