Almost Like Living Out of a Suitcase

More and more young people are choosing careers over marriage and kids, and moving to urban areas to follow jobs. And across the globe, the main problems with this are the rents and lack of living space. To try and solve this problem, the Spanish architecture firm TallerDE2 designed The Pop-Up House, which is basically a set of modular units designed to make a fully functional home out of any empty room or apartment.

To showcase the design, the architects first emptied out a 737-square-foot apartment, and fitted the interior with a set of 54 modular units, each of which fulfills a certain function in the home, such as kitchen, dining room, living room, bedroom, etc. Collectively, this infrastructure of modular units is called The Pop-Up House, or, as the designers refer to it, the gathering element. And while each unit can be unfolded in different ways, the element itself stays in the same place.

The Pop-Up House is made of OSB panels. These were used to save money as well as give the modules a visual consistency. The different functional spaces within the units are denoted by handles, which show where each unit can be opened to form a kitchen counter, a shower, a dining table, storage, and so on. To make this design resemble a suitcase even more, the architects lined the walls of these units with tiles and wallpaper resembling the ones that were used in the lining of old suitcases.

Since all the necessary parts of a home are housed within these modular units, the available free space in the apartment rises from 50 percent (as it was before the apartment was cleaned out) to 77 percent, which is quite an improvement.

As the number of single households in cities increases, this type of living space solution could also lead to downsizing, and consequently sustainable living. Now all that remains is convincing people that living tiny is not really about giving things up.

Related Articles on JetsonGreen.com:
Paris Apartment Successfully Pushes the Limits of Living Tiny
Space Saving Sliding Furniture
Tiny Apartment Big Enough to Fit a Family of Three

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