With an eye on urbanization, population growth and efficiency, tiny spaces were a big theme at this summer’s Dwell on Design conference in Los Angeles. Designers from around the world showcased housing and products for living small – from transformable furniture and pre-fab trailers to 3D printed interior objects. Often their strategies sought to reduce the human footprint on the environment and save energy as well.
Urban housing supplies are already straining worldwide with 54% of the global population of 7.2 billion living in cities, according to the United Nation’s World Urbanization Prospects 2014 report. By 2050, that number is expected to rise to 6.33 billion, or 66% of a forecasted world population of 9.6 billion.
In North America, about 82% of the total population – roughly 473.8 million people – lives in urban areas. The number of single-person households is rising, although housing has not kept pace with demographic change. Many of the new units being built are getting smaller and smaller, challenging municipal housing codes and zoning regulations.
Micro-apartments tricked out with scaled-down, adaptable furniture and decor could make urban dwelling more compatible with the way people increasingly live now – and help cities as they attempt to absorb more people in the future. The challenges include how to do so affordably, comfortably and with enough privacy to make these spaces homes as well as housing.
Breathing room
It’s not just about the buildings, however. Cities need more friendly parks and outdoor space to compensate for the lack of indoor spaces, said architect Michael Gamble, an associate professor at the Georgia Tech School of Architecture. Gamble guides students in examining the social and ethical issues involved in creating tiny spaces.
Gamble believes that micro-units must take into account the environment around the building. “There has to be a very healthy balance between what we call the public realm and the private realm,” he said. Without big windows and sufficient green space nearby, residents may feel constrained within their apartments.
“People need space to go to when they leave their apartment,” Gamble said. “They cannot be relegated to hanging out in a shopping mall or having to pay for a cup of coffee to use the Internet.”
Smaller spaces also may be linked to health risks and privacy issues. “There’s a tipping point related to general health and small apartments,” Gamble said.
Trapped in Hong Kong
Cramming more people into less space is nothing new in Asian cities like Hong Kong. The city’s Society for Community Organization (SoCO) recently hosted a photo exhibition called Trapped which showed photos of low-income families – sometimes made up of more than two generations – forced to live in subdivided apartments, some as small as 28 sq feet (2.6 sq meters). Children must eat, sleep and do homework on their beds.
According to SoCO, Hong Kong is home to nearly 300,000 children under 18 years old who are living below the poverty line. The organization also points to a survey by Policy 21 Limited, which showed that over 20,000 children under the age of 15 live in these types of subdivided units.
“Hundreds of thousands of people still live in caged homes and wood-partitioned cubicles, while the unemployed, newly-arrived families from [mainland] China and children in poverty struggle for survival,” said a SoCO spokesperson. “SoCO’s underprivileged clients are increasing in numbers – while the city’s wealth continues to accumulate.”
Compact New York
Cities need to move beyond old-fashioned ideas of what they think people need, and look into alternatives such as micro-units for single-person households and legal shared housing, according to Sarah Watson, deputy director of Citizens Housing and Planning Council (CHPC). “There’s a very fixed idea of what an apartment needs to be”, she said. “Who you expect to live in the unit will affect the design.”
CHPC, which hosted the Making Room exhibition on tiny living at the Museum of the City of New York in 2013, has found that 47% of New Yorkers over the age of 25 do not live with a spouse or partner. Many singles share apartments that were designed for families, with large master bedrooms and smaller rooms for children – a layout that doesn’t make sense for adult roommates. “It’s a real crisis because it ends up being hugely dysfunctional in the housing market,” Watson said.
The disconnect can also lead to dangerous situations. After a series of deaths from fires in illegally subdivided apartments in 2011, city officials vowed to step up regulation of these unregulated conversions. But weighed down by its established housing codes (pdf), the city is taking longer to respond to the changing demographics when it comes to new construction.
In 2012, then-mayor Michael Bloomberg launched the adAPT NYC competition to spur new designs for one- and two-person households. The mayor waived some zoning regulations so that construction of the winning proposal could start on a city-owned lot on East 27th Street in 2013.
Still under construction, the new complex will feature 55 micro-units ranging between 250 to 370 sq ft. Around 40% of the apartments will be affordable housing units priced below market rates. To “optimize space and maximize the sense of openness”, the design team integrated features like high ceilings and small “Juliet” balconies, refinements often neglected in low- and middle-income housing.
Adult tree houses
Mitchell Joachim, a New York University associate professor and co-founder of Terreform One, aims to create a wholly new concept for micro-dwelling by rethinking the interaction of ecology, botany and design. This version of the childhood dream hideaway is not a house in a tree, however; instead, it’s a house made of living trees.
Among Terreform One’s recent designs are tree spheres called Willow Balls. They are living treehouses just 8 feet (2.43 meters) in diameter. Joachim considers them semi-permanent, and says they can be used as seasonal spaces like gazebos or other outdoor recreational spaces. They’re made by growing ficus trees over a scaffolding frame similar to what gardeners do when they use pliable living plants to create archways. Once the fast-growing ficus trees cover the sphere, the scaffolding can be removed and re-used with another set of plants.
While the living-plants portion of the sphere is natural, Terreform One will manufacture the scaffoldings in Brooklyn out of wood or metal. Terreform One is currently taking orders for the scaffoldings – priced at $8,000 – and expects to put them on sale in early 2015.
The goal is to “nudge nature in its place into a geometric shape that is usable by people”, Joachim said. The design challenges the traditional idea of forestry because instead of growing trees, chopping them down and milling them into lumber to build houses, the trees transform into a house as they grow.
Acknowledging that shipping an 8 ft tree sphere through the mail is not energy-efficient, the design group is working on ways to mitigate this – perhaps by growing the sphere in place to lower the dwelling’s carbon footprint.
Re-thinking the toilet
The greater Tokyo area is the world’s most densely populated metropolitan region with some 38 million residents packed into about 5,200 sq miles. So small sinks and showers are nothing new in compact Japanese bathrooms. TOTO, the Japanese bathroom fixtures and plumbing company, showcased micro-toilet design for bathrooms as small as 9 sq feet (0.84 meters) at the Dwell on Design conference.
One of TOTO’s newest tiny toilets conserves floor space by hanging suspended from the wall with a thin high-efficiency water tank hidden from view within the wall. According to TOTO, it is 9 inches shorter in length than the average toilet.
The design also carries the EPA WaterSense label, averaging a lean 1 gallon per flush. This “saves a family of four more than $90 annually on their water bill, and $2,000 over the lifetime of the toilet”, said TOTO USA’s Lenora Campos.
Convertible furniture re-imagined
To furnish a micro-apartment comfortably, Resource Furniture has re-imagined the old Murphy beds and folding tables of yore with sophisticated book shelves, desks and sofas that can convert into beds. Drawers pull out from under stairs. Storage space is cleverly hidden within walls and pushed up to ceilings.
Another trend on view at Dwell on Design was decor in vertical layers to help use every inch of available space from floor to ceiling. A sleeping layer might include a platform bed with a desk or closet space underneath, for example. The living space layer could host an elevated couch or lounge as well as small kitchen. Closets could be squeezed between kitchens and bathrooms, and storage spaces have been created by adding an extra layer near the ceiling or under an elevated floor, leaving no space left underutilized.
Rachael Post is a writer, digital strategist and professor of emerging media in Los Angeles.
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