no2self.net

Happy birthday blog, you just turned 5 years old.

Here’s an interesting article on static caravan parks:

Trailers have long interested Morrish. He likes the simplicity of long, narrow, free-standing structures. Light and breezes come in from either side. If ceilings are pushed to 10 feet or higher, small rooms can feel much larger. And since most walls are exterior walls, the possibilities of adjacent gardens and indoor/outdoor spaces are many.

He had no quarrel, really, with the new urbanist movement. But stacking homes above retail shops along transit corridors can’t happen everywhere. Besides, there’s a “formula” to new urban design that doesn’t appeal to Morrish’s eclectic tastes.

And you thought I was kidding when I cited the caravan as fertile ground for housing ideas.

More from Morrish:

His new book, “Growing Urban Habitats, Seeking a New Housing Development Model,” will be out in June. It begins with a proposal to refashion an aging trailer park in Charlottesville, Va., and ends with a design that interlaces long, narrow structures that are affordable, sustainable and well-suited to the valley just below Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate.

“The project is fairly dense, but it doesn’t just stack units up into the air.”

Ok, point taken. I was exagerating for impact. Yet my drawing does rather neatly sum up the problem. Ask an architect about the opportunities for prefabricated housing and trailer park living and they’ll turn it into a building problem. A Rubik’s cube challenge of Lego-like simplicity.

As I said in the flickr comments for the image above, over at Axis we keep having conversations about housing models that get the balance right between independence and community/neighbourhood and we always end up at trailer parks. When those conversations turn into a live project we need to remember that this is a landscape problem, an infrastructure problem, a state vs. private, freehold/leasehold land ownership, territory problem. Not a building problem that’s solved with a crisp, cutaway axonometric.

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession—a hive occupied by generations of bees. In America, the houses seem privately ours, even when we have not built them up, in pine two-by-fours and four-by-eight-foot sheets of plywood, from a poured-concrete foundation. Houses are, as Newland Archer sensed, our fate. The houses we build in our fiction need not conform to a floor plan—indeed, the reader’s capacity for visualizing spatial relations is feeble—but they must conform to a life plan, feeding the characters’ senses whenever these turn outward, confirming social place with their walls and accoutrements, echoing in authentic matter the spiritual pattern the author intends to trace. A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction. Every novelist becomes, to a degree, an architect—castles in air!—and a novel itself is, of course, a kind of dwelling, whose spaces open and constrict, foster display or concealment, and resonate from room to room.

John Updike on fictional houses. Found, about 5 links deep through twitter and web, here: Architectural Digest

Richard Horden in BD on the development (2 years on) of his micro compact home:

Horden is now working on the family compact home, where kids have their own cube. ‘I’m constantly coming up with variants,’ he says. ‘Next is a low-carbon version. It could be built like a car on a production line, but we don’t have enough orders.’ So how many have been sold? ‘We’ve only built 15 and haven’t sold any… yet. I get emails saying what a wonderful idea. Of course when they see it, it’s much too small for most people.’

Size: 2.6m x 2.6m

Price:

“m-ch units are available to purchase for delivery to geographical Europe at a guide price of EUR 25,000 to EUR 34,000 (subject to contract). This price includes all interior fittings. Subject to site conditions, the price excludes delivery, installation, connection to services, consultant’s fees and taxes.”

Cost per sq m: 3698.22 EUR

photo credit

Grantham Caravans on their Sterling Onyx micro compact home:

We always have an excellent selection of new and used caravans for sale. The comprehensive touring caravan accessory shop is well worth visiting. We display all the latest caravan and leisure equipment and run special offers throughout the year. We are specialists in touring caravan insurance. We also have a coffee shop.

A warm welcome awaits you at Grantham Caravans – we look forward to seeing you.

Size: 5.51m x 2.29m

Price:

EUR 20,232.26 – deliver it yourself, no need to connect to services, no consultant’s fees or taxes.

Cost per sq m: 1603.45 EUR