In China’s megacities, the arrival of the affordable-rental era has not erased the design habits, aesthetic biases and evaluation vices inherited from the commodity-housing boom. Architects still have to correct them professionally.

Change X Community sits on a typical peri-urban Shanghai plot—48,000 m² of land, 2.5 FAR—utterly representative of the city. GOM uses this project to search for a design method specific to the rental era, hoping to expand the architectural vocabulary of rental housing and, by extension, refresh thinking about all housing types.

When extreme unit-data make conventional types such as single-loaded slabs obsolete, a close reading of building codes and planning statutes produces an unconventional type—not an invention, but a return. Convincing a client wired for pro-forma logic required numbers, not architectural rhetoric.

Born from post-occupancy reflections on Building 5 of Longnan Jiayuan and from full-scale mock-up sessions with the client during the Xuhui Binjiang project, the new duplex fits 2.18 m bedroom height—an unprecedented move that unlocks mezzanine space inside a micro-footprint. The design exploits rental tenants’ higher tolerance for “making do”, affirming the right to be frugal.

The long east-west site exposes the weakness of the default slab typology. Cutting it into four blocks is the most literal reading of the terrain: it dissolves the intimidating street-wall length and generates distinct sub-types and spatial combinations. Plate, point and U-shaped buildings are mixed across the four clusters to diversify both architecture and demographics.

Unit sizes span 25 m² to 100 m², inviting varied age groups and household structures. Programmes mutate with policy and market feedback: one entire Small-Block Tower is operated as dormitory-style housing for frontline municipal workers. The four-cluster plan gives this heterogeneous population the spatial heterogeneity it needs.

Unlike the architect-free standardisation of the commodity era, this project is driven by the loop of market-testing and design research. Urban design → cluster design → building design reversed the old habit of “standard unit → standard floor → standard plan”.

The constructive dialogue with the owner fused a top-down architectural vision with a bottom-up operational vision that begins with user profiles and market positioning.

Building regulations are the source code of the built environment. Harsh, inherited rules on daylight, orientation and spacing need post-occupancy evaluation with new housing types; only then can the legal framework distorted by land-fiscal fever be debugged and a more rational urban algorithm written.