May 20, 2013
Mexico-based architect Armando Birlain López’s winning design in the Denver Architectural League’s ideas competition for riverfront micro-housing.
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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May 1, 2013
The live-work concept began as a liberating idea, conjuring visions of warehouse lofts, minimalist studios, and freedom from the Man’s watchful eye. But Greek designer Athanasia Leivaditou of Studio NL has a different take, one that rings far truer in our post-recession, micro-obsessed era.
Dubbed 1.6 SM of Life, Leivaditou’s convertible desk-bed is perfect for that mid-range user who needs more than an Ostrich Pillow but less than a foldaway bed. In four easy steps, the desktop slides out and releases a side panel to reveal the pallet and pillow beneath, allowing you to stretch out in 17 square feet of total bliss. Read more!
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March 13, 2013
Photo courtesy Design Taxi
Now here’s something you don’t see every day: an adorable little bungalow perched on a boulder smack in the middle of a river. Seems like a terrible idea, right? Well, apparently this hearty, one-bedroom shelter in Serbia, on an island in the Drina River, was built nearly 45 years ago and has survived its fair share of treacherous weather (even flooding!). Fortunately, nobody lives here—it’s merely a resting place for kayakers, swimmers, fishermen, and anyone else who cares to venture out. Read more at HuffPo.
Photo courtesy FlyFishingBalkans
Photo courtesy Design Taxi
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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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February 14, 2013
Despite its many charms, the single-family home’s days are numbered. The new American dream? Living small! As cities become more dense, people will have to learn how to live smaller. Developments are already afoot, if initiatives like adaptNYC are any indication of the future of housing. This isn’t to say that smaller apartments need be a drab affair. After all, there’s always room for good architecture.
These new downsized studios and apartments should be supplemented with plenty of collective spaces open for use by all residents, along with the typical amenities, such as access to shopping and mass transport. And, lest we forget, the units themselves should offer aesthetic respite from the world outside. Each of the five finalists for the Architecture + Living Small award do all of these things and more. Click through to see them all!
Spot a favorite? Make sure to vote for it over at the A+ Public Voting site!
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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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January 22, 2013
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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October 21, 2012
Nettleton 198 by SAOTA from our Top Ten: Playboy Architecture
We had a big week here at Architizer. We’re just launched the A+ Awards, and it’s shaping up to be biggest architecture awards program out there. Really. We were at the 2012 MAS Design Summit, where we met up with Lord Foster, Roger Duffy of SOM, and WXY architecture (see the video here). We snuck into Google’s data centers, one of which turns out to be hidden inside an old Alvar Aalto-design machine hall (the things you learn!). Oh, and we launched our biggest giveaway ever! Stay tuned to see if this week was as good as the last, but in the mean time, have a look at our biggest stories from the past five days. Continue.
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October 18, 2012
“Lucky Drops”, Tokyo
Architizer is hosting the world’s definitive architectural awards program, with 50+ categories and 200+ jurors. As part of an ongoing series, we’re spotlighting projects that fit the “Plus” categories, which tap into topical and culturally relevant themes. Today, in an effort to show you examples of good candidates for the Plus awards, we present five “Architecture + Living Small” projects. To see a full list of categories and learn more about the awards, visit architizerawards.com.
It’s a well known (and well-touted) fact that half of the world’s population now lives in cities. This “trend” toward urbanization isn’t exactly new, nor will it slow down any time soon–by 2050, projections forecast that the number of city dwellers will swell to account for 70% of the global population. But how will we build to accommodate them all?
It’s clear the answer–at least part of it–lies in the “densification” of the future city, which will have grown far more crowded, and at a faster rate, that it does today. Urban planners and participants agree that building higher will help, but buildings in general will have to become smaller, designed to be mobile, functional and aesthetic objects all at the same time. In short, people will have to learn to live smaller. The Architecture + Living Small Award will recognize the best projects in this category.
Click through for our top 10 micro-living solutions.
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