Takako Tajima and Katrina Stoll Szabo’s 300-square-foot micro-unit model for LA Forum can accommodate a double bed, a kitchen and bath, a living area, and storage. Photo: Luke Gibson

We’ve come down hard on micro-apartments for promoting dorm life for full-fledged adults, glorifying prison cells, and lacquering unlivable pockets of space with a designer sheen that’s unattainable on most micro-incomes. But with an in-depth new show on micro-living at Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design to consider, we’re prepared to give the idea at least 220 square feet of our attention.

On view at the WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles through August 4, “How Small Is Too Small?” offers Angelenos a taste of living on the mini scale. Viewers who wonder how tiny a box they might compress their lives into can amble around a 300-square-foot mockup made from MDF and plywood. The MDF toilet is truly a work of art! Check it out after the jump.

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Clockwise from top left: Attic apartment in Torino, Italy; cottage in County Galway, Ireland; interior of Torino apartment; and Lock House, in County Kildare, Ireland. Photos courtesy of Architects House Exchange.

If you’re tired of scrolling through the IKEA-and-shag-carpeting nightmares on VRBO, consider this new vacation-rental site created just for architects. Dublin-based designer Eva Byrne recently launched Architects Housing Swap for industry folk who want to travel to faraway lands—so long as they can do it while gazing upon the right sort of coffee-table books.

Byrne’s membership service is perfect for anyone who’s stuck at the bottom of the Living Architecture waiting list, or maybe still reeling from sticker shock over Peter Zumthor’s suite of Swiss rental properties. And if you sign up before June 28, you’ll get the €100 annual membership fee waived for your first year! Read more.

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Architects who take Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) commissions sure don’t have it easy. William Pereira’s original 1965 design for a museum floating above a landscape of pools and fountains promised an exalted place for art in LA—until tar underneath the site began oozing in and the pools had to be paved over. Two decades later, a 1986 addition stuck out sorely after it was only partly integrated with Pereira’s buildings. And in the early 2000s, Rem Koolhaas’s unifying vision of pavilions under a transparent Mylar roof fell through for want of funds. Renzo Piano has been the lone starchitect to get away with actually building something on the LACMA campus: He completed the Broad Contemporary Art Museum in 2008, followed by the sawtoothed Resnick Pavilion in 2010.

Now the Pritzker- and RIBA-decorated Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has sidled into the tricky tapdance of politics, finances, and miscellaneous architectural allegiances that define the LACMA campus. In an unusual move, Zumthor and museum director Michael Govan have been developing the design privately over the past six years. Everyone, from the art-loving public to potential donors, will see it for the first time when a new exhibition about Zumthor opens this Sunday, June 9. The centerpiece of the show is a 30-foot model of what LACMA has dubbed “the Black Flower.” If Zumthor is permitted to work his magic, this curvilinear lily pad in dusky concrete will spare us the current boxy layout—and may even transform the museum experience into something at once more casual and more meditative. Here is your sneak peek!

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Long before the MakerBot hit its stride as a favored source for jewelry, chocolate goodies, and even hermit crab shells, silkworms had been 3D-printing their own houses for ages. In their pupal stage, the critters spin about a kilometer of silk thread into the cocoons that protect them as they develop into moths. Now the geniuses at the MIT Media Lab have figured out how to get the common silkworm to 3D print houses for us. Read more!

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View of the expansion from Yerba Buena, across Third Street.

Back in 1995, when SFMOMA opened its granite-and-brick building in San Francisco’s South of Market district, the museum was an early cultural presence in a transitioning industrial area. “We were pioneers in this neighborhood,” museum director Neal Benezra said at Wednesday’s groundbreaking ceremony for the much-anticipated expansion by Snøhetta. Back then, Mario Botta’s fortress of patterned brick worked well on a street where there was little else to connect to.

Eighteen years later, the museum has grown—with two or three times its original collection and programming, said Benezra—and the neighborhood along with it. South of Market is now the home of Twitter and a host of other tech companies, and with the Transbay Transit Center going up in its back yard, SFMOMA is not one to miss out on the neighborhood’s latest growth spurt. The expansion includes a 10-story tower in rippling lightweight concrete tucked behind the Botta building, along with new pedestrian entrances from alleyways and a 50-foot-tall green wall on a neighboring parking garage. When the building opens in early 2016, the museum will double its current exhibition capacity and add 41,000 square feet of unticketed public space.

After remarks from Benezra, board chair Charles Schwab, and Mayor Ed Lee, Snøhetta principal Craig Dykers took the stage. He described the expansion’s progress in an elaborate birthing metaphor, a process instigated by dozens of consultants engaged in architectural “polyamory.” Whatever the means, this new stepchild will make an extrovert out of the Botta building. “The museum, which was once introverted, will be open to passersby,” said Dykers. Whether the ensuing burst of silver confetti was meant to signal the beginning of labor—or some sort of giant collective archigasm—we’ll never be sure! Read more.

Photo © Drew Altizer Photography

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James Corner Field Operations is revamping Chicago’s touristy Navy Pier. Phase one of the redevelopment is scheduled for completion by summer 2015, in time for the pier’s centennial the following year.

From an economic standpoint, Chicago’s Navy Pier is already a success. With amenities like a 150-foot Ferris wheel, a children’s museum, a Shakespeare theater, and a half-mile of shops and food vendors on Lake Michigan, the pier is the most popular attraction in the Midwest (well, after the Mall of America!).

From a design standpoint, however, it’s a total mess. A big overhaul in the 1990s transformed the pier into a very of-the-era waterfront tourist mall of the sort that Michael Sorkin decried in Variations on a Theme Park. “When they did the project, they gave it a carnival aesthetic, and over the years it’s become very tired, very jumbled,” says Elva Rubio, principal and regional design director of Gensler’s Chicago office. “It’s very touristic, literally cliché—if you open up the dictionary, this is what you would see.”

Yes, Navy Pier is a South Street Seaport in a High Line era. So when James Corner Field Operations emerged as the winner of an international design competition last year, it was clear that Navy Pier’s board had grasped the importance of top-notch landscape architecture for our own time’s big buzzphrase, urban placemaking. Read more.

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The New Haven, Marseille, 2013.

When the San Francisco-based artist (and avid surfer) Jay Nelson wanted a car he could sleep in for his frequent trips to the coast, he didn’t need an RV—just a new way of looking at a sedan. Nelson had acquired a rusting 1986 Honda Civic, and with the addition some plywood, fiberglass, and a set of porthole windows, he built himself a barn-style bedroom over the trunk. If Buckminster Fuller had been a beach bum, he might have arrived at a motor-pod like this. Sleeping in cars never looked so good!

Since that first rusted Honda, Nelson has unleashed his woodworking skills on a string of consumer vehicles: He’s hitched his faceted plywood domes to cars, boats and, once, a scooter. No two rigs are ever alike, but they all have a rack for a surfboard.

Now, as a newly minted artist in residence at Facebook, Nelson is working on a design for Silicon Valley’s youngest architecture snob, Mark Zuckerberg. Read more!

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Figolu, 2005–11. Photo: Jerry L. Thompson/Courtesy of Storm King Art Center

We’re closer than we’ve ever been (and now we’re even closer!) to the SFMOMA expansion, which will break ground on May 29. The official last day to appreciate the Mario Botta building’s intactness is June 2, at the close of a four-day countdown celebration with free admission for everyone.

To kick off its series of off-site programming, which must carry SFMOMA (and the rest of us) through early 2016, the museum fittingly went with something monumental. Director Neal Benezra organized a retrospective of Mark di Suvero’s large-scale steel sculptures at Crissy Field, a former airfield on the waterfront near the city’s Marina district. The show doesn’t officially open until Wednesday, but joggers and pedestrians will be forgiven for noticing the eight enormous steel assemblages hulking over their usual dog-walking routes. Read more!

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The Mexico-based practice SAC Studio de Arquitectura y Ciudad won first place in the Denver Architectural League’s ideas competition for riverfront micro-housing. SAC team members: Wyatt O’Day, Rodolfo Unda, João Barbosa, Jovana Grujevska, and Armando Birlain López.

On Friday the Denver Architectural League announced the winners of its micro-housing ideas competition. The contest solicited designs for an eight-unit building with micro-apartments that range from 250 to 375 square feet, sited on a narrow swath of riverbank in a sparse industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of downtown. The league invited architects to imagine a structure so virtuous—net-zero, built on a leftover slope of undesirable land, virtually no parking, etc.—that its inhabitants might just be theoretical figments themselves. (Who wants to live in 250 square feet and be forced to take the bus to town?)

All in all, the competition drew 70 proposals, 25 of which came from abroad. And what do you know, the winners all hail from outside the United States, which makes sense given this country’s general discomfort with small (New York, San Francisco, and this place excepted). Read more!

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Architects and aesthetes just love to disguise ugly infrastructure. We’ve seen so many kinds of proposals, from electrical substations made over with tiles and mirrors to highways trellised with ivy. Now the folks at AZPA want to dress up a coal-fired power plant outside Hamburg as a resplendent green “mountain” surrounded by new public park.

With a porous, mesh-like cladding that will support CO2-hungry creepers, the revamped plant would play a role in cleaning the air that it is also polluting. Can a lush, vegetated power plant become a genuine public good, or is this just a brilliant stroke of greenwashing? Read more!

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