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Tiny Houses by Mimi Zeiger
Rizzoli, 2009
Hardcover, 208 pages
The decision to live sustainably
comes into play at different scales, from light bulbs to
the distance between home, work and shopping. Three broad
scales can be noted: consumer products, buildings and the
larger natural and urban context. The first encompasses
household goods, the foods we eat and processes, like knowingly
using canvas bags when going to the store or taking short
showers. The last involves where we choose to live and work,
a decision that impacts mainly how much driving is necessary,
but also our level of exercise and our social well-being.
The second, the focus of this book, involves our home, its
size, energy usage and other factors affecting the inhabitants'
ecological footprints. All are important and can be seen
as part of a larger web of life that fails to see a differentiation
between large and small scales. Everything affects everything
else. So to focus on one aspect paints an incomplete picture,
but in this case the subject is an invitation for changes
at the other scales.
Mimi
Zeiger carefully titles her collection of 36 projects
so it is clear that the trend of small, or not-so-big
houses -- a reaction to bloated McMansions in the suburban
realm -- is not small enough. The houses here range in size
from just over 1,000sf (93sm) to only 10sf (1sm). City dwellers
could argue that the first is hardly tiny, but compared
to the average American house size -- 2,330sf (216sm) in
2004 -- the difference is larger than the biggest of the
tiniest here, and the majority here are less than half of
that. The book is arranged from tiny to tiniest, with a
handy area box on each page (with the teeniest font I've
ever seen in print, either an editorial error or a joke,
playing on the book's title). This arrangement clearly illustrates
that the smaller a house becomes, the more creativity is
required in its design. It's fairly easy to create a 1,000sf
house, but the architect needs to stretch his or her brain
muscles to develop an abode 1/10th that size. This creativity
obviously extends to the occupants, who must do without
certain things, the third R in the reduce-reuse-recycle
triad Zeiger discusses in her introduction.
How this middle of the three scales
I mentioned impacts the other two is dealt with directly
and indirectly here. The reduce aspect of living in a tiny
house surely means less consumer goods in less space, a
fact not lost on Zeiger, who also mentions the reduces energy
required for powering and conditioning tiny houses. Indirectly
is the fit into the larger natural and urban context. A
number of projects find themselves within the former, like
the cabin on the cover by Olson
Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects. While these houses
fail to effectively address the largest scale of sustainability,
the antithesis can be found here in almost equal numbers.
Great examples are Korteknie
Stuhlmacher Architecten's Parasite Las Palmas, Atelier
Tekuto's Lucky Drops and Recetas
Urbanas's Puzzle House. They illustrate how the potential
of reducing one's own ecological footprint can extend to
one's neighbors, to the betterment of the most people in
the smallest space.
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