VORTEX: A Shortlisted NomadHouse 2020 Co-Living Hub That Spirals Around Water and Shared Life

Most co-living proposals stack bedrooms above a shared lounge and call it community. VORTEX takes a harder position: if digital nomads are going to belong anywhere, the building has to keep pulling them toward one another. Its massing coils around a rotational geometry that drags circulation, water, and landscape inward. The resulting plan treats home, workplace, garden, and public space as parts of one continuous spatial experience rather than separate programmes sharing an address.

Designed by Nicholas Lim, Megan Riri, and Siao Si Looi, VORTEX was a Shortlisted entry in NomadHouse 2020. The team set the project against Singapore's Greater Southern Waterfront masterplan, a city-scale transformation of the southern shoreline. They chose not to treat the site as a self-contained development. Instead, they positioned it as a node linking the downtown core, the waterfront, its greenery, and future modes of transport.

Green and Blue as Structural Systems, Not Scenery

The opening views establish the project's two governing systems. Green covers the planted terraces, gardens, and outdoor rooms. Blue covers the waterways, recreation, and mobility. In the low upward view, curved balcony tiers peel off the glass tower above the tree canopy, so the landscape reads as part of the building's section rather than a lawn at its base. The accompanying site plan places the scheme within the wider waterfront fabric, which supports the team's claim that the project operates at an urban scale.

The second rendering makes the blue system tangible. A cantilevered tower hangs over a waterway while a boat pulls up to the glazed podium, a direct statement that water here is an arrival route as well as a view. This is the proposal's most persuasive move. By bringing water into the site, VORTEX ties itself to Singapore's shoreline and frames mobility as part of the residential experience.

A Twisting Mass Shaped by Circulation, Airflow, and Terracing

The axonometric shows the vortex for what it is: a generator rather than a sculptural gesture. The team's diagrams break the form into five interlocking principles: circulation, water, airflow, extrusion, and terracing. Circulation follows the rotation, so residents move through and around the development instead of riding lifts between sealed floors. Airflow informs how the volumes are oriented and spaced apart, which matters in Singapore's climate. Terracing steps the large vertical masses down into a sequence of accessible outdoor platforms.

The exploded stack of floor plates is the more revealing drawing. It shows the twist as a cumulative offset, floor by floor, and each shift opens space for terraces, bridges, and voids. The three circular detail views zoom in on these moments, which is where the concept succeeds or fails at human scale.

Pulling Every Resident Toward a Shared Core

The aerial axonometric of the diamond-shaped pavilion beside the river explains the social logic of the whole scheme. Shared programme gathers at the centre, while residential accommodation sits toward the periphery. This sets up a clear gradient from private retreat to collective life. The circled details identify what fills that core: an auditorium, library, café, lounge, and open-air kitchen. Indoor and outdoor activity spaces, co-working environments, and recreational facilities complete the mix.

The concentration is deliberate. Rather than splitting residents into separate towers, the circulation keeps routing them back to common ground. A resident might leave their unit, cross a landscaped bridge, work in a collaborative studio, and run into a neighbour at the café, all within a single loop. For a typology built around people who arrive alone and leave often, this kind of engineered encounter is the real brief.

The Desk, the Window, and the Neighbouring Tower

The interior renders bring the argument down to the scale of a working day. In the residential unit, a wooden desk faces a floor-to-ceiling window that frames a neighbouring glass tower. It is a quiet image, but it shows the periphery doing its job: private and focused, yet still visually tied to the rest of the community. The co-working render offers the counterpoint, with people at white tables, a wireframe display wall, and soft daylight through the glazing.

Read together, the two images trace the gradient the plan promises: solitude at the edge and collaboration toward the centre. The renders could push harder to show the terraces and water reaching these interiors. Even so, they make clear that the team designed for how nomadic work actually feels, not only for how the building looks from the river.

Why This Project Matters

VORTEX treats the digital nomad as a citizen of a larger urban ecosystem rather than a short-term tenant. That reframing gives the proposal its weight. By tying co-living to the Greater Southern Waterfront and making landscape and water part of the building's organisation, the team argues that sustainable architecture works best at the scale of the whole urban experience, not as a checklist applied to a facade.

The project's strongest lesson is that form can carry social intent. The vortex is not a styling exercise; it is a circulation strategy that turns movement into encounter and pushes residents toward one another. Whether every terrace and bridge would hold up at full scale is a question for future development. As a competition entry, though, VORTEX shows convincingly that the boundaries between home, work, landscape, and public space can be designed to dissolve.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Nicholas Lim, Megan Riri, Siao Si Looi

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Project credits: VORTEX by Nicholas Lim, Megan Riri, Siao Si Looi NomadHouse 2020 (uni.xyz).