Nests: A Woven Tower That Stacks Places to Rest High Above a Restless City

Q: Who wrote "Nests: A Woven Tower That Stacks Places to Rest High Above a Restless City"?

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Q: What is "Nests: A Woven Tower That Stacks Places to Rest High Above a Restless City" about?

This article covers topics related to Architecture. A column of tangled, spherical pods turns the bird's nest into a vertical refuge for sleep, standing apart from the glass towers around it.

A column of tangled, spherical pods turns the bird's nest into a vertical refuge for sleep, standing apart from the glass towers around it.

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UNI Editorial published Results under Architecture on Oct 30, 2026

Cities build upward for work, for housing, for views. They rarely build upward for a nap. Nests starts from that gap and answers it with a single, disarming image: a tower made not of floors and curtain walls but of woven shells, each one sized for a body that needs to stop. Against a skyline of flat glass, it reads less like a building and more like something that grew there overnight.

Nests is the work of Mohamed Abdellatif, with Ayşe Sala and Aleyna Sanlı credited for design iteration. Its tagline is as short as the project's ambition is direct: "A nest where you can rest!" The proposal received Editor's Choice at Cocoon, and it earns that attention mostly through the force of a single, legible idea carried from skyline to sleeping pod.

A Pale Column That Refuses the Grid of Glass

The opening panoramas set the terms. In a hazy, desaturated cityscape of rectangular high-rises, the tower is the only warm-toned object, a cylinder of stacked rings that catches light the way basketwork does. It sits on a small green plinth while its neighbours meet the ground with parking lots and blank podiums. The contrast is deliberate: where every other tower shows a repeated window, Nests shows a repeated vessel, and the eye counts pods rather than storeys.

One version of the panorama pairs the image with a line attributed to Rumi, "Each has to enter the nest made by the other imperfect bird!" It is a telling choice. The project frames rest as something borrowed and shared, a shelter built by others that you climb into for a while, rather than a private room you own.

Rendered tower of stacked woven pods rising among grey high-rises in a hazy city panorama under a cloudy sky. Image: Mohamed Abdellatif, Ayşe Sala, Aleyna Sanlı

Rendered pod tower standing among pale high-rises in a misty city panorama beside a quoted line of poetry. Image: Mohamed Abdellatif, Ayşe Sala, Aleyna Sanlı

Rings of Pods Wrapped Around a Hollow Core

The diagram sheet is where the tower turns from emblem into section. The circular plans split the building into alternating levels: one ring given to sleeping and resting areas, the other to circulation, each organised around a central core. Pods line the perimeter like cells in a honeycomb, so every resting place gets an outer face to the city and an inner mouth facing the shared core. A hanging, suspended seat appears beside the clustered shells, hinting that not every place to rest needs to touch the floor.

The figures inside the pods do the most persuasive work. People curl up, stretch, sit upright, hold yoga poses, lie on their sides. The shell is not a capsule bed with a fixed posture; it is a hollow you inhabit however your body asks. That looseness is the project's most humane move, and it separates Nests from the efficient but rigid logic of sleeping capsules.

Diagram sheet showing the pod tower, individual woven pods with people resting inside, and circular plans of sleeping and circulation levels. Image: Mohamed Abdellatif, Ayşe Sala, Aleyna Sanlı

Strands Instead of Walls

Up close, the pods dissolve into a tangle of crossing strands, rendered in warm brown, dark grey and violet. There is no panel, no seam, no facade module in the conventional sense. The structure and the enclosure are the same thing, the way twigs are both frame and wall in a real nest. The cluster view in the centre is especially striking: spheres press into one another, each with a dark opening, and the whole mass starts to look organic and slightly unsettling, closer to a seed pod than to architecture.

That ambiguity is a strength in image and a challenge in explanation. Junwoong Seog, who judged the competition, praised the inventiveness of the result while pressing on exactly this point: how the strands, the pods and the experience inside them should be communicated to someone seeing the work for the first time.

Three close-up renders of tangled wire-like strands forming spherical pods, shown in warm brown, dark grey and purple tones. Image: Mohamed Abdellatif, Ayşe Sala, Aleyna Sanlı

I think your results are very innovative. I think the design output is also very good. However, I think we need more detailed explanations that can make such an innovative result understandable to many people. I think the process of visually communicating and understanding your thoughts to the other party is also important for this competition. Innovation is important, but meticulousness sometimes touches even more.
Good luck.Junwoong Seog, Director & Chief designer, BY SEOG BE SEOG, South Korea

A Module That Can Grow Sideways as Well as Up

The final diagram sets the tower against a stormy sky and annotates it with a short argument. The pod is a module; modules stack; the stack can be expanded vertically and horizontally, shown through a row of tower silhouettes of varying width. The board claims a form inspired by nature, which it argues makes the idea universal, and positions the cylinder as a landmark distinguished by its form against a backdrop of bar-chart-like neighbours.

The logic is clean, and it suggests a building that could swell or shrink with demand rather than being fixed at a single height. It is also where Seog's critique bites hardest: the expansion diagrams state the possibility without yet showing how a new pod attaches, how loads travel through the woven shells, or how the core keeps pace as the tower grows. The idea is legible; the mechanism is still waiting to be drawn.

Diagram of the pod tower against a stormy sky with notes on modularity, expansion and its role as a skyline landmark. Image: Mohamed Abdellatif, Ayşe Sala, Aleyna Sanlı

A Lantern at the End of a Crowded Street

The strongest image in the set abandons the aerial view entirely. Seen from street level, down a dense shopping corridor packed with signage and pedestrians, the tower glows at dusk like a paper lantern. The buildings on either side shout with logos; Nests says nothing and simply radiates. Here the project's purpose becomes emotional rather than diagrammatic: amid the crowd, it promises somewhere to step out of the current and lie down.

Glowing pod tower seen down a crowded shopping street at dusk, flanked by signage-covered buildings and a pedestrian crowd. Image: Mohamed Abdellatif, Ayşe Sala, Aleyna Sanlı

Why This Project Matters

Rest is one of the least designed activities in the contemporary city. Nests treats it as a civic programme worthy of a tower and a landmark, and it gives that programme a form drawn from the most universal image of shelter there is. By letting bodies take any posture inside a hollow shell, it also argues that restorative space should adapt to people rather than the reverse.

The project's open questions are as instructive as its images. A powerful metaphor can carry a proposal a long way, but, as the jury noted, it gains its full weight only when the thinking behind it is made visible step by step. Nests shows how far an idea can travel on clarity of image alone, and points toward the meticulous next layer that would let it stand on the street it so beautifully lights.