Vertical Flux: A Modular High-Rise Where Living, Working and Community Overlap for Digital Nomads

The mixed-use tower has long been a filing cabinet: shops in the bottom drawer, offices in the middle, apartments on top. Vertical Flux argues that this tidy stacking no longer fits people whose workday, home life and social calendar refuse to stay in separate drawers. The proposal treats living, working and communal life as moving forces that cross, overlap and reorganise throughout the building, and it asks the high-rise to become as adaptable as the digital nomads who would occupy it.

Designed by Chung Zhi Xue and Ng Wei Liang, the project was shortlisted in NomadHouse 2020. The site sits within the dense fabric of Marina Bay, Singapore, among transit connections, commercial towers, public destinations and major views. The designers combine modular architecture, movement-based planning and digital navigation technology to frame the building not as a fixed object but as an urban framework that shifts with its occupants.

Reading Marina Bay as a Set of Overlapping Pulls

The axonometric site plan reveals how the tower's form begins outside its own footprint. Overlapping circles mark the influence of views, neighbouring towers and transit stations, and the stepped massing sits where these fields intersect. This is the project's first useful move: rather than imposing a generic tower on a prime plot, the designers map the city-scale movements already passing through Marina Bay and let them inform where the building opens, rises and steps back.

The drawing also sets up the project's central metaphor. If the surrounding city is a web of competing flows, the tower becomes the point where those flows meet individual routines. The building is positioned as a junction between the commute, the view and the daily habits of a mobile resident.

Carving a Void Through the Solid Block

The massing studies trace a clear progression from a solid block to a carved volume, with a pink void cut through its heart. Beside them, the intersection of flux diagram shows living, working and social functions as overlapping systems rather than discrete floors. The designers describe these programmes as fluxes that generate different spatial conditions depending on circulation, density, privacy, views and patterns of interaction.

The void matters because it is where the fluxes collide. Instead of a sealed core surrounded by identical floor plates, the carved interior creates a shared vertical space where activity can be seen across levels. The result reads less like a tower and more like a city compressed vertically, with open workspaces, private working modules, living quarters, cafés, conference spaces, lounges, networking areas, multi-use rooms and terraces distributed throughout.

A 3m x 3m Module as the Building's Grammar

The atrium render shows container-like units stacked on terraces within a diagrid structure, with small figures crossing the pale floor below. Beneath this apparent complexity sits a deliberately simple rule: the proposal is built from modules of roughly 3m x 3m arranged within a consistent structural grid. These modules form the basic unit for accommodation, workspaces and other programmes, allowing many configurations to emerge from a single system.

The paired renders bring that system down to human scale. A concrete-walled corridor, punctuated by a figure in a red coat, conveys the intimacy of moving between modules, while the vine-draped facade beside the diagrid suggests how planting softens the repetition of the grid. Because modules can in theory be prefabricated, inserted, relocated or reorganised, private workspaces can expand or contract, residential clusters can change and shared areas can appear where circulation intensifies. The architecture sets the rules and leaves the outcome open.

An Atrium That Makes Movement Visible

Looking up through the white diagrid, the atrium render captures the project at its most persuasive: containers, cantilevered decks and people suspended in warm light, all visible to one another across the void. This is where the idea of a vertical neighbourhood gains real spatial weight. Chance encounters, the backbone of any nomadic community, are encouraged by sightlines rather than left to the lift lobby.

The sectional axonometric clarifies the logic behind that atmosphere. Teal-tinted floors sit within the regular grid, while a red flux line threads through the void, tracing how movement links programmes vertically. Read alongside the designers' use of digital navigation technology, the drawing positions circulation as the organising force of the tower, a route through the building rather than a shaft that bypasses it.

Why This Project Matters

Vertical Flux targets a real weakness in high-rise development: the assumption that each floor should carry one permanent function. By pairing a strict 3m x 3m modular grid with a carved, shared void, the designers propose a tower that can accommodate change without demanding redesign, and that brings work, rest and community into the same field of view.

The proposal's strongest contribution lies in its balance of rigour and openness. The grid keeps the building buildable and scalable, while the flux concept keeps it responsive to occupants whose routines rarely hold still. For a generation that works from anywhere, Chung Zhi Xue and Ng Wei Liang offer a convincing sketch of a high-rise that behaves like a neighbourhood rather than a stack of separate floors.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Chung Zhi Xue, Ng Wei Liang

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Project credits: Vertical Flux, by Chung Zhi Xue, Ng Wei Liang NomadHouse 2020, (uni.xyz).