You’ve spent countless hours playing the beloved video game Tetris, twisting and rotating the varying tetriminos as they fell down your screens and fit into place. But, did you ever think that one day you could inhabit one of these idiosyncratic pieces?

Designed by Chinese Studio Liu Lubin, the modular “Micro-House” is built around the ability to shift, stack, and fit together individual units of dwelling, much like the pieces of Tetris. The units each focus on a single daily activity, such as resting, cooking, or working, and are built with a fiber-reinforced composite structure for easy transportation and assembly. Developed to ensure personal privacy while still meeting China’s strict land use policy, a prototype of the minimal home is currently on display in a Beijing park. Let’s just avoid stacking the home in lines, less it disappear. We’ve got more photos below!

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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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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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Installation view of LaunchPad, the micro-unit on display at the Museum of the City of New York, designed by Pierluigi Colombo and Amie Gross Architects. Photo: John Halpern/courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York

If you’ve ever walked into a New York apartment and thought to yourself, Well, there is just TOO much space in here! get over to the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) and experience your shortest pace-through ever in the dollhouse/storage locker/”apartment” of the future. With its pert fuchsia couch and sliding TV, the 325-square-foot unit from Pierluigi Colombo and Amie Gross Architects anchors the exhibition “Making Room: New Models for Housing New Yorkers,” which opens tomorrow and will be on view through September 15.

Earlier today, Mayor Bloomberg visited the museum to announce the winner of the city’s adAPT NYC competition, which asked architects and developers to propose designs for New York’s first micro-unit apartment building. Noting the city’s changing demographics—just about half of the population is single, and one-third of households are occupied by adults living alone—Bloomberg called upon New York’s unmarrieds to put themselves in storage until they pair up. Actually, the mayor put it much more mildly: “The growth rate for one- and two-person households greatly exceeds that of households with three or more people, and addressing that housing challenge requires us to think creatively and beyond our current regulations.” If only he still permitted 32-ounce soda cups—we could just live in those! See more from the show, plus the winning adAPT NYC design, after the jump.

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Following last week’s announcement by Chinese developers for plans to build the world’s tallest structure in three months time is this modest (yet no less significant) record-breaking design. Last month, the latest iteration of the Micro-Compact Home was installed on a hillside plot overlooking Lake Maggiore in Switzerland, with construction times clocking in at just under 5 minutes. The 2.6 meter (8.5 feet) wide prefabricated house, dubbed m-ch 016, was flown in by helicopter and delivered to the elevated site, which had been prepared beforehand with foundation pads, plumbing, and electric wires, and even landscaping and terrace already in place. Once the 1.8 ton structure was lowered into position, a small construction team speedily

The sixteenth in the series of micro-structures developed by London-based designer Richard Horden of Horden Cherry Lee Architects, the house is unique in that it sports a light-weight aluminum frame rather that the wood version employed by its predecessors. The new model is also slight larger, extending an extra meter in all directions to accommodate dwelling space for 2 people. That may not sound like much of an expansion, but that one meter makes all the difference in what some would call claustrophobic space. There’s room for an adjustable double bed, a living/dining space capable of seating eight guests, a bathroom with shower, and a respectable kitchen, complete with cupboard, sink, fridge, and microwave. The house even has air conditioning, LED lighting, beige leather wall treatments a custom sound system, and, most importantly, that inimitable panorama.

The m-ch 016 by Richard Horden

[via dezeen]

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