Synchronizing Village: A Vertical Housing System Leased by the Day, Week or Month

What if a home were something you assembled each morning rather than something you owned? Synchronizing Village starts from that question and follows it through. It treats the dwelling as a set of parts that can be pulled apart and recombined. A resident arrives with a suitcase, picks a configuration of spaces, and keeps it for a day, a week or a month. The kitchen, the bath and the bed stop being fixed rooms inside one private unit. They become shared stock, allocated over time and stacked into a single vertical building.

The project was shortlisted in the Plugin Housing Challenge 2020. It was designed by Ching-Wen Huang, Xu Zhiyang, Ying-Ru Lin, Li-Ying Chu and Chen Yuquan. The team's target is the young professional, the student and the financially stretched resident of an expensive metropolis. Their argument rests on data. They studied commuting patterns and how shared space is used in Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai, Taipei and Singapore, and they use that research to ask how housing could work more efficiently in dense cities.

The Lower Floors Turn Cooking and Lounging into Collective Ground

The building is organised by floor, and each level gets its own colour. The orange first floor holds a kitchen unit and a long shared dining table where figures gather. The green second floor moves into a softer social register, with a lounging nook, clusters of standing people and another long table. The sequence matters. The most communal activities sit closest to the ground, and the plans read as open fields of furniture rather than rooms closed off behind doors.

This is where the team's principle of dismantling functional needs becomes physical. Nobody owns the kitchen, so nobody needs a kitchen of their own. The small, repeated domestic infrastructure of a typical apartment block is gathered into a few generous rooms. The isometrics show these rooms in use, which suggests that an occupied table is the real measure of success here.

Privacy Rises with the Section

On the way up, the programme narrows toward the body and the individual. The blue third floor contains a laundry corner and a bathroom with a shower and a round tub. The yellow fourth floor is given over to small bedrooms, each holding a bed, a desk and a wardrobe. Read together, the four floors map a gradient from public to private. The drawings suggest this is how the team handles its pledge of sharing with individuality: shared life lives below, the private cell lives above, and vertical circulation ties them together.

The bedrooms are deliberately minimal, and that is the point. Once cooking, washing and socialising move out of the unit, the private room can shrink to what one person needs for sleep and work. Space is leased by time, and an intelligent allocation system distributes the four space types according to daily needs. In practice, that means a resident's footprint in the building can grow or shrink from one day to the next.

A Square Grid Planted Among the Trees

The site plan shows how plainly the idea lands in the city. The footprint is a square set on a regular grid of columns, ringed by tree canopies and neighbouring blocks. The column grid sets the logic of the whole scheme. The team breaks traditional architectural form into cubic living modules, and a structural grid like this provides a neutral frame into which those modules can be slotted, swapped and stacked into what the designers call a vertical village.

Lifting the Village off the Ground

The section brings the strategy together. Four storeys sit on raised columns, every room is occupied by orange figures, and faint trees flank both sides. Raising the building leaves the ground plane open. The populated rooms show the project as a working ecosystem in which each module plays a part. What could easily have read as an abstract system diagram becomes legible as a building people move through: down to eat, across to lounge, up to sleep.

Why This Project Matters

Synchronizing Village takes the logic of the sharing economy seriously as an architectural problem rather than a branding exercise. Plenty of co-living proposals stop at a shared lounge attached to otherwise conventional flats. This team goes further. They decompose the dwelling into time-leased components and stack them by degree of privacy. The result is a clear, testable proposition about affordability: if residents rent only what they use, when they use it, the cost of urban living could fall sharply.

The open questions are real. How does an allocation system handle peak demand? How does a resident build attachment to a place that changes daily? Still, the clarity of the floor-by-floor organisation and the grounding in research from five Asian megacities give the proposal a rigour that conceptual housing entries often lack. For a generation that already lives out of a suitcase, it offers a frank picture of what home might become.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Ching-Wen Huang, Xu Zhiyang (徐智煬) MArch-I-106, Ying-Ru Lin, Li-Ying Chu, Chen Yuquan (陳郁荃) MArch-I-108

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Project credits: Synchronizing Village by Ching-Wen Huang, Xu Zhiyang (徐智煬) MArch-I-106, Ying-Ru Lin, Li-Ying Chu, Chen Yuquan (陳郁荃) MArch-I-108 Plugin Housing Challenge 2020 (uni.xyz).