Planetfurry BBS

[Vallus]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg9qnWg9kak

I would love to see that concept take off and implemented large scale!

[Rabbit]

I wouldn't care to live in it, for a thousand reasons. It's better than a "corridor living room", as the video put it, which I see as an ultimate nightmare. But I can barely function in my current kitchen, for example, which is many times the size of that one. And, I _like_ my clutter.

No thank you. But then, I tremble at the idea of living in a major city period.

[D.F. Thompson]

I could see that for like a college dorm room. Or a young singles apartment complex. But as for myself I'd have to agree with Rabbit.

[Asalis]

A cool idea though considering the rates of apartments here in the US these days, i think it would be cheaper to share payments on a house with a couple others.

[shortwave]

i wonder what the sound deadening qualities are ... the sounds of the neighbor folk would be frustrating

[Teric]

Dang... that looks WAY cool. I'd like to try that out--but then I'm kind of a neat freak in the first place.

[aryeon]

hmmmm great designe for a cramped city like hong kong.
well now we seen the futher on how we all will live.

[PrincessB]

Interesting, however, undesirable for me. More desirable would be less overpopulation or move to the country. (I don't like too big of cities anyway)

[GriffinX]

i think i can understand why hong kong is the way it is. first you have to remember is that up intell about what 2, 3 years ago hong kong was still part of the british empire. not part of comunist china, so lots of people flocked to it. second is where hong kong is located think of a valcano's caldera with a third of its steep walls having given way to the sea. that is what hong kong's geographe is like and since most of the mountanis reagin that serounds hong kong is less stable then say, the wasatch falt. it makes sence for them to have to crunch together.

[ScottyDM]

That's a great idea for a very small space, but I'll bet it's costly. Still, for Hong Kong the cost of the land has got to dominate.

I question the necessity of a laundry area for a high-rise. A common laundry area wouldn't be so horrible.

Living like that would force people to be neat. If you left clutter around you couldn't transform your rooms.

------
Tiny houses in general are a very cool idea. They wouldn't work for a big family, but then if you've got enough kids the average sized US house of 2,500 square feet starts to look pretty tiny.

Part of the problem of having lots of space is that most people accumulate lots of junk to fill it up. Moving might be the perfect time to go through all your accumulated stuff and get rid of what you don't need, but that time is stressful enough, plus most people too busy to do anything but pack and load.

There's a whole tiny house movement going on. In the northwestern US one of the leading proponents is Jay Shafer, who owns Tumbleweed Homes. Here's a YouTube walk through of one of his smaller models. The thing is on a trailer because US building codes prohibit a house under a certain number of square feet. He also has plans for larger permanently sited homes starting around 250 square feet. Here's a vid of how Jay's crew builds a house. The Fencl is their largest trailerable model and is 130 square feet. Very conventional construction, except for the trailer.

Stephen Marshall is another experienced designer/contractor building tiny homes.

Author Shay Salomon wrote a book, Little House on a Small Planet. She talks about what the smaller house has to offer people. It fits in with smaller transportation and "smaller" diets (low fat, low meat, vegetable based).

In an interview with a TV reporter one owner said, about living in a house under 100 square feet, that you had to really think about every purchase. "If I buy this will I have space to store it?" Which takes us back to the concept that many of us have way too many things in our lives. Small forces us to be neat and live within our means.

If your mortgage was 1/4 of what it is now, if your utility bill was equally tiny, and if you didn't buy a lot of junk because you had nowhere to put it, what would you do with all the extra money? Invest? Quit your crappy job and become an artist? Travel to a new country for your vacation each year?

Maybe not 96 square feet, but a smaller house is an attractive idea.

S~

[Scifer]

They were toying with a similar concept at a German art/science expo I went to as a teenager. Seems like a great idea for student accommodation, where the authorities have to cram as many people into as little space as their budget dictates - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30oaInir18M

If you think about it, it also has the potential to be VERY secure. Perhaps all of your valuable items, computer and electrical equipment, etc, can be hidden away behind secret panels in the walls. Maybe they have to be opened in a specific way to avoid an alarm going off ... I think the microapartment is a great idea.

Although, I wouldn't want to get drunk at a party in one. Fall asleep and get folded away inside one of the panels ... it could be days before they find you again.

[Rabbit]

[quote=



------
Tiny houses in general are a very cool idea. They wouldn't work for a big family, but then if you've got enough kids the average sized US house of 2,500 square feet starts to look pretty tiny.

Part of the problem of having lots of space is that most people accumulate lots of junk to fill it up. Moving might be the perfect time to go through all your accumulated stuff and get rid of what you don't need, but that time is stressful enough, plus most people too busy to do anything but pack and load.

If your mortgage was 1/4 of what it is now, if your utility bill was equally tiny, and if you didn't buy a lot of junk because you had nowhere to put it, what would you do with all the extra money? Invest? Quit your crappy job and become an artist? Travel to a new country for your vacation each year?


S~[/quote]


Well...

I value my privacy and clutter more than anything else in the universe. No, I don't _need_ all my stuff. But I _want_ it, or I wouldn't have bought it in the first place, now would I?

I don't exactly live in a mansion now, and am considering downsizing a bit due to increasing age and decreasing willingness to perform yard maintenance and housekeeping. But...

... I absolutely _refuse_ to feel guilty for enjoying having lots of stuff and enough space to walk from room to room. Yes, it's costly in every possible way. But _nothing else_ that I could buy would do _remotely_ as much to make me happy as my suburban home has. Were that claustrophobic, overcrowded Hong Kong apartment building my future, I'd abandon all hope and hang myself tomorrow. Just the _idea_ of being so limited in how I can live and being so inescapably close to all those other people all the time makes me shudder.

I spent my early years in an apartment a bit bigger than that one. Even back then, the happiest day of my young life was when we got a house outside the city and I could finally _spread out_ a little and spend more time off by myself. At age eight, I was already thoroughly sick of thin walls, crowded alleys, heavy traffic, high crime rates, and no creeks to splash and play and catch tadpoles in.

[ScottyDM]

[tijn]

I bet the 'cleanliness' of the movie is a setup. If you live there it doesn't like so after a month.

What interests me is that most people here seem to think living in such confined quarters so bad it's repulsive to them. I agree because I think that one can only live in such a small area if one isn't really acquinted with more spacious living.
You would be used to a different situation if living in a house sized like you have now would be ten times out of your league.
To put it differently: as long as you 'don't know better' you will accept a small place. But if you've tasted the (mental) freedom of living in the country-side and being able to step out of your place and see space and hear nature's default silence you will have a hard time going back to the city.

I think someone cannot revert to living in a small apartment in a big city, in blocks, after a lot of time in a sparsely build-up area. However, I put it to you:
if you would be 'locked' in a tiny room in a city (you could clutter it still ), but would your mind be equally locked in?
(Rabbit, would you still be able to write and dream up your worlds?)

I don't think the man in the movie would've been so happy if he'd always lived in a nice house.

[Syrius]

While simple can be beautiful, I draw the line when the number of feet separating the toilet from the kitchen stays in the single digits. I've seen prison cells with more space than that.

You can have too much home space all right. And too little as well.