Under Construction: A Parking Tower Framework Where Digital Nomads Relocate Their Homes Without Leaving

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This article was written by UNI Editorial and published on uni.xyz, a platform for design professionals and creative thinkers.

Q: What is "Under Construction: A Parking Tower Framework Where Digital Nomads Relocate Their Homes Without Leaving" about?

This article covers topics related to Digital Nomad Housing, Infrastructure Design, Housing. Mobile residential pods circulate through an expandable hexagonal steel framework, turning the address itself into something a nomad can change at will.

Most housing assumes you will stay put. The walls are fixed, the plan is fixed, and the line between home, office and neighbourhood is drawn once and never revisited. Under Construction starts from the opposite premise: if digital work has already untethered people from a single desk and a single city, then the home itself should be able to move. The proposal splits architecture into two parts, a large vertical framework that behaves like a parking tower and a fleet of compact, vehicle-like residential units that travel through it. The building is never finished, and that is the point.

Designed by 劉家宏 MArch-I-106, the project was selected as an Editor's Choice entry in NomadHouse 2020. The title is a literal description of the scheme. The structure expands, contracts and reorganises as the number, preferences and activities of its residents change, so its form at any moment is a snapshot of the community living inside it rather than a fixed object.

Units Become Blocks, Blocks Become Towns

Diagram sheet of axonometric drawings sorting unit sizes S to XL, from laundry and shop to gym and library, with stacked floor plans

The diagram sheet sorts the system by size, from S to XL, and the range of programmes is telling: laundry and shop at one end, gym and library at the other, with stacked floor plans showing how each slots into the framework. Shared services are treated as modules too, which means the communal life of the building can grow alongside the number of homes instead of being frozen at the day of completion. The tower supplies infrastructure, circulation, utilities and communal platforms; the units supply privacy and occupation.

The framework is built from repeatable hexagonal steel components that can be added or removed as capacity demands. This is where the project moves beyond prefabrication as a construction shortcut. Modularity becomes the social logic of the scheme: units aggregate into blocks, blocks into neighbourhoods, neighbourhoods into towns, and towns into districts that together form an adaptable urban network. It is a clear, scalable chain, and the drawing communicates it with a cataloguer's precision.

One Pod, Three Modes: Living, Working and Opening Up

Axonometric drawing of a single pod unit with labeled sunroof, stair and balcony, plus plan views of social, living and working modes

The single pod axonometric is the most important drawing in the set, because it shows that the unit is not an apartment bolted to wheels. Labelled components, a sunroof, a stair and a balcony, hint at a shell designed to unfold. Inside, the essentials are compressed into a tight footprint: sleeping space, a compact kitchen, washing facilities, storage and a small living area, with furniture systems that reposition according to the occupant's activity.

The three plan views make the strategy legible. In Living Mode the pod is a private residence. In Working Mode the same furniture reconfigures into an office, meeting area or discussion space, so working from home no longer requires a dedicated room. In Social Mode the side windows extend into balconies, the roof boundary opens and the stair leads to the upper surface, letting the pod reach toward neighbouring vehicles and shared platforms. The house changes function by changing shape, which is a far more honest answer to nomadic life than a studio flat with a fold-down desk.

The Truss as a Street

Rendered interior of a triangulated steel truss with pod units, walkways and white human silhouettes, lit by red glows at dusk

At dusk, the interior of the framework reads less like a building and more like an elevated street. A triangulated steel truss sets the rhythm overhead, walkways thread between parked pods, and red glows pick out the units as small lit dwellings within the larger structure. The white human silhouettes are doing useful work here: they establish that the space between pods is meant to be walked, lingered in and shared, not just used as a service corridor for moving vehicles.

A Framework That Looks Out to the City

Rendered truss floor with glass panels opening toward a harbor skyline, silhouetted visitors pointing at a distant pod in daylight

Rendered interior hall under a diagonal truss ceiling, with silhouetted people, a cyclist and a reflective pod in cool blue light

The daylight renders open the framework outward. In the first, glass panels on a truss floor frame a harbour skyline, and silhouetted visitors point toward a distant pod, a small gesture that captures the novelty of watching a neighbour's home in transit. The building is porous to its context; the communal platforms double as viewing decks onto the city that the nomads have chosen, for now, to inhabit.

The second image shifts to a cooler register: an interior hall beneath a diagonal truss ceiling, people moving through it, a cyclist crossing, and a reflective pod parked within the space. The mirrored skin of the unit absorbs its surroundings, so the private home almost dissolves into the public hall. It is a quiet suggestion that these platforms are civic ground, closer to a covered plaza than to a car park, even though the structural vocabulary borrows directly from one.

Stacked Floors Between Living Walls

Rendered vertical section view between two ivy-covered mirrored walls, showing stacked truss floors with silhouetted people and glowing red lights

The vertical section view captures the scheme's ambition in a single frame. Stacked truss floors rise between two ivy-covered mirrored walls, with silhouetted figures on each level and red lights marking occupied positions. The mirrors multiply the depth of the framework and the planting softens its industrial edge, but the more significant reading is vertical: every floor is a potential neighbourhood, and the pods' ability to move up and down means those neighbourhoods are never sealed off from one another.

Why This Project Matters

Under Construction takes a cultural shift seriously and follows it through to the scale of structure. Many nomad housing proposals stop at the portable unit; this one asks what kind of host infrastructure such units need, and answers with a framework that grows and shrinks by demand. Separating the permanent from the mobile, utilities and platforms on one side and private homes on the other, gives the scheme a coherent logic that scales from a single pod to an urban district.

The proposal leaves open questions, as speculative work should: how ownership of a moving address is governed, and how a community holds together when its members can relocate at will. But the core move is persuasive. By making the home the mobile element and the building the fixed armature, 劉家宏 MArch-I-106 reframes architecture as an ongoing process shaped by its residents, and that is a provocation worth carrying into the next conversation about how and where we live.