LIVING.BRAND — HD#9
Designer Living for the mass
The possibilities of space optimization
Living like the rich — a desire for most of the general public. However, unobtainable for the majority of people today, specifically with a constantly increasing wealth gap. The current development of the planet’s capital distribution is in no way on the right path and inequality will unleash problems we cannot even foresee right now. While advancing technology and business model innovation elevated a few people into astronomic monetary spheres and pushed others into poverty, it also enabled the restructuring of old processes, opinions, and perspectives. Looking at old buildings and apartment structures, it is obvious that the status in society was closely connected to the size of the space someone owned. A bigger apartment translated into more wealth even if the space did not really have any actual usage. This way you ended up with huge apartments for the wealthy and tiny chambers for the maids or other “lower level” people. Nowadays, however, the idea of wealth shifted and belongings do not necessarily mean more net worth anymore. In times of rising minimalism and ownership on demand, it can even be seen luxurious to own as little as possible. This does not only count for general products such as clothing, but also for earlier status symbols such as cars or houses. People favor freedom over commitment, which eventually leads towards minimizing someone’s need while maximizing someone’s possibilities. For housing, this means slowly reducing your effective sqm usage until you eventually reach levels of tiny living in your private space and big living in your shared and public spaces. You and your neighbor do not need a 50 sqm living room and could rather share the space to free up additional 50 sqm for other types of usage.
In order to create these new types of housing, we need architects, designers, developers as well as the construction industry in general to collaborate on projects and ideas. The quest for space optimization will bring up completely new ideas of how to create and build structures, while also introducing new materials, methods, and perspectives. The following paragraphs will explore a few new concepts from a designer, architect, and startup that show some new directions.
Yeezy Home
Music mogul, turned fashion designer, turned architect, Kanye West introduced his project “Yeezy Home” a few months ago. The idea behind the concept focuses on social housing that tries to bridge the gap between social and income classes while also using the existing space in the buildings in a smart and sufficient way. West draws inspirations from the Star Wars movies, which is a good example of how designers or makers can get into a different industry and apply an altered perspective to the field as opposed to most others working in the industry for years.
The Collective
Co-Living startup The Collective just revealed plans for a new building in Brooklyn, where they teamed up with renowned architect Sou Fujimoto. This is a rare example of a startup collaborating with a big time designer to build a residential living solution. Usually, the building industry is mainly driven by profit margins and a maximized ROI, which leads to poor design, cheap material and non-ideal execution from an aesthetics and atmospheric point of view. Teaming up with Fujimoto shows that good design and extra investments in a thoughtful approach eventually pay off while increasing the well-being of the end customer or tenant in this case.
Neri Oxman
The Israeli architect Neri Oxman explores new building materials within her Mediated Matter Group that she is leading at MIT. It is her main quest to draw ideas from nature and use them to find new ways of building and structuring today’s world with a focus on sustainability and the environment. One of her latest projects features a swarm of Fiberbots that autonomously create architectural structures while communicating with each other and their surroundings on the way. This can be used in the future to create side-specific structures without a blueprint or pre-plan and will eventually bring us to create buildings without waste.
There will be more and more ideas and visions from various people in all kinds of industries that bring a new perspective into our built environment while changing the way we live. Thinking about a combination of the ideas that drive someone like Kanye West or Neri Oxman and connecting them to actual developers or startups that can take these visions into reality already shows what direction architecture is heading into.
Designer Living might be an exclusive term in today’s world, but it will be the only way we can actually tackle the problems on our planet right now.
Without designers and makers of all kinds, there won’t be solutions for a damaged status quo.
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