Nomad House: A Singapore Tower Where Work Becomes Something You Do, Not Somewhere You Go

Most towers are decided before anyone moves in: the residential floors here, the offices there, the amenities wherever the leftover area falls. Nomad House refuses that premise. It starts from a deceptively simple question, what happens when work stops being "a place to go" and becomes "a thing to do"?, and follows the answer all the way up a vertical structure where housing, workspace, creative facilities, communal areas, landscape and infrastructure behave as parts of one evolving system rather than a fixed stack of programmes.

Designed by Elif Leblebici and recognised with a People's Choice Award in NomadHouse 2020, the speculative proposal imagines a modular architecture for digital nomads in Singapore. Its target occupants are recruiters, data analysts, editors and writers, online tutors, designers, media professionals, startup developers and researchers: people whose work happens through digital platforms, shared studios, temporary teams and collaborative networks rather than at a permanently assigned corporate desk. The building is designed to hold all of them at once, without privileging a single demographic or profession.

A Terrace That Treats the Desk as Optional

The co-working terrace is the clearest statement of the project's critique of the conventional office. Instead of predefined rooms and fixed furniture layouts, people settle among planted beds beside a leafy tree, with fluted glass screens offering a degree of separation without sealing anything off. The screens are the telling detail: they filter rather than divide, which suits a workforce whose teams expand, contract and overlap from week to week.

Placing work outdoors, within planting, also reframes what a workplace in Singapore's climate might be. Landscape is not a decorative amenity tacked onto the brief; it is listed alongside housing and infrastructure as one of the system's working parts, and this view shows it doing the job of an office floor.

The Atrium as Shared Ground Between Floors

Leblebici describes flexibility operating at three scales: macro, where the building accommodates changing clusters and programmes; meso, where floors and communal areas support shifting activities; and micro, where units and interior partitions respond directly to occupants. The double-height atrium sits squarely in that middle register. Hanging planters soften the volume, and a white diagonal stair cuts across it, turning vertical circulation into a visible social route rather than a sealed core.

That stair matters more than it might first appear. In a tower meant to host communities that form around shared interests or professions, the ability to see and drift into the floor above is what allows those communities to find each other. The silhouetted figures against the distant skyline make the point quietly: this is a public room suspended in the city, not a lobby to pass through.

A Planted Tower Rising From a Stepped Park

The presentation board pulls back to the whole building: a planted tower lifting out of a stepped park, with a massing diagram beneath. The stepped base reads as a continuation of the ground rather than a podium that closes the building off, consistent with the proposal's ambition to stop splitting the city into isolated zones for living, employment and recreation.

The massing diagram is where the idea of user-generated programmatic diversity becomes legible. The project illustrates a sequence of specialised clusters distributed vertically, but it is explicit that these are not permanent institutional departments. They are a snapshot of one possible state, demonstrating how the tower could reorganise as new forms of work and social life emerge. The architecture is responsive rather than prescriptive, and the diagram is honest about being provisional.

Village Clusters Stacked Into a Vertical City

The exploded axonometric reveals the social logic underneath the tower's form. Housing is gathered into stacked clusters, closer in spirit to a collection of neighbourhoods than a single block of identical floors. Read alongside the schematic plan and the circular detail of terraced floors, the drawing shows how modularity shifts from a construction strategy into an organisational one: each cluster is a unit of community as much as a unit of building.

The terraced floors in the circular detail tie the system back to the earlier views, suggesting that the planted, open-edged condition of the co-working terrace is repeated through the section rather than reserved for a showcase level. This is where the macro, meso and micro scales lock together: clusters can change, floors can host new uses, and partitions can move, all within a consistent structural and spatial framework.

Why This Project Matters

Plenty of proposals for remote workers stop at furniture: hot desks, pods and lounges dropped into an otherwise conventional building. Nomad House goes further by questioning the tower itself, arguing that if occupations no longer require a fixed workplace, the building should not require fixed programmes either. Its three-scale model of flexibility gives that argument a structure designers can actually test, rather than leaving adaptability as a slogan.

The People's Choice recognition is fitting, because the project's strongest idea is a social one. By letting occupants generate the programme and organising residents into village-like clusters, Leblebici treats the tower as a framework for community formation rather than a container of units. As work continues to detach from place, that shift from designing functions to designing the conditions for them to emerge is the question housing architects will increasingly have to answer.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Elif Leblebici

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Project credits: Nomad House by Elif Leblebici NomadHouse 2020 (uni.xyz).