More than a Smart Apartment, Part 1
Recently a couple of my connections commented on a post of this link to a video about a Smart Apartment
The video is pretty cool, it reminds me of the modern motor home with pop ups and pop outs, but it is more interesting and probably much less practical, because nothing pops up or out, the space is limited from the outside, unlike the motor home or camper that is only limited while on the road.
One basically has to rebuild your living space three to four times per day. This includes putting boards on your bath tub too make it a sofa (you also have to store the boards and the cushions, and it looks as comfortable as a bad futon (arent all futons bad?)
GEORGE WU, A.I.A.伍荣基 ARCHITECT, a Chinese trained architect, who has spent most of his career in New York, and is currently in love with container housing, suggests an alternative is container built cities linked to the mega city by bullet trains.
I do think the 300 sq ft home for four people is not a viable solution in most cases. That's 75 sq ft per person. Most jails dedicate more individual space than that! I think less than 200 sq ft per person is getting impractical, no matter how many walls you move. The problem is that in the worlds major cities, from Peking to New York, London, Rome, and so on, the sq ft cost of real estate, plus the actual building cost gets so high that 300 sq ft looks like it MUST be an option, because it costs over million USD and that is at the top of the range for most working people, maybe three times the realistic range of MOST working people.
But I wonder if the train ride to a "bedroom community" isn't just a modified version of the 1960-1980s growth of suburbia, that is pretty much now seen as a failed experiment. While I am neither a fan nor an enemy of container housing.
Pros:
1) Its already built and it is very sturdy (assuming you dont cut too many, too large holes in it.
2) Its cheap, about $2000, per 20 ft long by 8 ft wide, by 8 ft high. (40 ft long is available at even lower sq ft pricing)
3) they are designed to be stacked, so they are ideal components for apartments.
Cons:
1) They are very limited in size,though you can cut and weld, but the basic unit is still 8 x 8 x 20 (or 40), and most of us like rooms wider than 8 ft, in fact, they are less than 8 feet, because the interior wall has to be built inside the steel wall. This can be overcome by setting say three containers side by side and cutting out one wall on each end section and two walls on the middle section. This would give you a 24 x 20 room, ideal for a great room, or two units set side by side for a 16 x 20 bedroom, and so on. One can get creative, but that is still a lot of steel cutting and waste.
2) Land is the issue, even more than the cost of construction. If you gave me a lot in the city center, I could frame up a wood frame house for $5-6 per linear foot, pour the slab for $2 per sq foot. Roofing would be a bit more expensive, but not much, you are still very close to the same $12.50 for a shell, maybe $15, but you have unlimited flexibility of design, you can build on site. With the containers, they would have to have tons of hours of steel cutting tools in an industrial setting and then transported to the location to be finished out.
I can tell you from years in construction, having large components that need to fit together in a custom manner leads to lots of headaches, and heavy duty steel is not easy to manipulate for your average carpenter.
The container does not have Plumbing, Electrical, HVAC, wall, floor and ceiling finishes, insulation, or an interior wall, for that matter. In short, containers are a viable option, but not a great breakthrough compared to traditional wood or CBS.
Enough on Mr. Wu's containers, no matter what you use for builing material, the question remains: How do we solve the $1,000,000 tiny apartment problem in a green and sustainable way?
Carefully standardized Reference Geek at ANS Group Plc; JOAT and penguin farmer
8 年I remember seeing a modular design like this made from shipping containers - but in that model, the main container had two kitchens and two bathrooms, and there was a second container that dismantled completely into flat panels to form the walls and some roofing for additional rooms from each side of the "core" container, which also had the power fittings and connectors for lighting units. The idea was that the pair would form two complete housing units, or even four if resources onsite were short, and could be shipped easily to disaster areas to be rapidly assembled.
speechless .... brilliant
Product design leader, developer and mentor.
8 年Also if you are stacking such units side by side and mirrored so that there would be one isle for access to units that face each other, then the bathroom would ventilate to the isle if its not using mechanical ventilation through a duct. There is no trace of such a duct in the blueprint. It would be better for the bathroom to be positioned in a spot that could grant natural ventilation instead of mechanical. There is no point in having a full bathroom with tub and everything when you are sparing squared footage. This is not thinking outside of the box to make as much as you can of the space available. Again, this is not a good example of proper minimal architecture, and it definitely would have costed you a semester in my school.
Product design leader, developer and mentor.
8 年The failure here is that you are trying to solve minimal space only from a 2d perspective. Its porting 100 year old architecture to new problems. Also, from cost efficiency perspective it is really unfavorable to have the bathroom and kitchen so far apart which would double the cost of water pipings for sourcing and collection. This would have granted me a failed semester at architecture school.
Owner, MJW Architects
8 年Building Control would not allow means of space pass the kitchen / hob. That was what I found recently on a similar design I was doing.