February 20, 2013
Aside from the economic whupping of 2008–2009, a major casualty of the recession was space itself. Homeowners and businesses bled square footage, leaving behind a landscape of empty McMansions, vacated big-box stores, and now-famously abandoned shopping malls. Since then, many municipalities have been grappling with how to repopulate these spaces with more nimble, post-boom uses. Existing mall mashups pretty much stick to the public realm—like Cleveland’s indoor gardens and Vanderbilt’s health clinics—but this spring a shuttered shopping center in downtown Providence will be reborn in micro form, with two stories of micro-apartments above ground-floor micro-retail. Micro-micro more!
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February 19, 2013
Roth Sheppard’s design competition is inspired by micro-units in Europe, such as this short-stay apartment in The Hague by Maff. Photo courtesy of Maff
Architects love to design micro-apartments, but do people love to live in them? Jeff Sheppard, principal of Roth Sheppard Architects, hopes so. He and his colleagues at the Denver Architectural League are betting that tiny units will appeal to young Denverites who find themselves priced out of the mortgage market and who want to live in dense neighborhoods. The league recently launched a tiny-dwelling design competition that adds up to a particularly tall order: an eight-unit net-zero building on a difficult slice of riverbank on the outskirts of downtown. At 375 square feet a pop, the units will definitely be more generous than the 220-square-footers planned for San Francisco and the 250 now allowed in New York—but still diminutive compared with Denver’s 500-square-foot prefab tiny Starbucks. Read more!
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January 24, 2013
My Micro NYC; image: nARCHITECTS
On Tuesday we wrote about the new exhibition “Making Room: New Models for Housing New Yorkers,” which opened yesterday at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY). The exhibition–full of dollhouse-sized studios and apartmentlets of the future–includes several of the designs submitted for New York City’s adAPT competition. The winning submission, My Micro NYC, by nARCHITECTS, Monadnock Development LLC, and the Actors Fund Housing Development Corporation, will be developed on a site on East 27th Street in Manhattan. The structure will include multi-purpose spaces, lounges, and even an attic garden, providing luxuries not typically associated with efficiency apartments while encouraging interaction among neighbors. But while a lot of attention has been given to the winning proposal, there were actually 33 entries in total, a record within the Housing and Preservation Department. We’ve collected a few of the other submissions for your viewing. Click through to check them out!
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