Flux HAus

Flux Haus is a housing system that proposes a new way of living for the inhabitants of Sham Shui Po, reimagining how density, work, and dignity can coexist within a single structure. Designed by architect Jitendra Farkade and developed over 2018-19 from Barcelona, Spain, the project treats the home not as a fixed set of rooms but as a responsive mechanism that adapts to the people who use it.

At the heart of the proposal is a high tech mechanism of multi directional elevators paired with transformative spaces, allowing volumes to expand, contract, and reconfigure according to need. The guiding premise that “nothing belongs to you” reframes ownership as access, so a unit can become a workshop by day and a place to rest by night. Through this logic the system aims to solve the problems of housing while also giving a dignified space to work for the Sham Shui Po locals.

Designing for extreme density

Dense urban housing has always asked architects to do more with less, balancing privacy, daylight, ventilation, and shared infrastructure within tight footprints. In neighbourhoods where every square metre carries economic weight, fixed partitions can trap families in spaces that no longer fit their lives. Flexible and transformable interiors respond to this by letting a single floor area serve several functions across the day, a strategy long studied in compact public housing and in the broader field of transformable housing.

The choice to develop the concept from Barcelona, a city known for its disciplined urban grid and tradition of dense block living, gives the scheme a useful lens on how circulation and shared space shape daily life. Vertical movement is central here: rather than treating elevators as simple links between floors, Flux Haus makes them part of how space itself is distributed. That ambition connects the project to wider questions of sustainable architecture, where adaptability and shared resources reduce waste and extend the useful life of a building.

By dissolving the boundary between living and working, Flux Haus reads less as a finished building and more as an argument about what housing could become when flexibility, mobility, and shared access are designed in from the start.