The Matranga family built a 560-square-foot tiny house for their family of four in 2022, experiencing both love and regret about its design after four years of living there.
Meininger, who grew up in Germany but now lives in London, likes making things. So when he saw how much his young sons enjoyed the jungle gym and play forts at the local park, he made an indoor treehouse for them.
"To address housing affordability in our community, we need all types of affordable housing options, including affordable ownership opportunities that allow individuals and families an opportunity to build equity alongside housing stability," said Santa Clara County Supervisor Betty Duong.
The Off-Grid Luxury Mobile Double Office is a trailer-based unit that packs two fully independent workspaces and a sleeping area into a 26-ft (7.9-m) frame, all while running entirely on solar power. Built on a double-axle trailer, the unit spans 10 ft (3 m) wide, broader than a standard tow, which means it requires a permit for road transport.
"We need to reduce emissions from the building sector by 80-90%, and build almost 2 billion new homes by the end of the century," warns Kuittinen. These imperatives... are incompatible, which is why we need to consider radically different housing and construction solutions.
When you think about building a house, what materials come to mind? Brick, wood and metal all come to mind; there are also some very distinctive glass houses out there. (Even if their occupants should refrain from throwing stones - though honestly, that's a good tip for indoor living in general.) A group of MIT researchers have come up with a very different way of making buildings, and it's one that also addresses an ongoing waste issue."We've estimated that the world needs about 1 billion new homes by 2050. If we try to make that many homes using wood, we would need to clear-cut the equivalent of the Amazon rainforest three times over," explained AJ Perez, who conducts his research in the MIT Office of Innovation. The title of a paper written by Perez and his colleagues - "Design, Manufacture and Testing of Structural Trusses Using Additively Manufactured Polymer Composites" - gives a sense of the solution that they have in mind.