Micro Living

For everyone who’s ever dreamed of simplifying their life and downsizing their home, Micro Living offers an insider’s look at what tiny house living is really like. Best-selling author and tiny house enthusiast Derek “Deek” Diedricksen profiles 40 tiny — but practical — houses that are equipped for full-time living, all in 400 square feet or less. Detailed photography and a floor plan for each structure highlight inventive space-saving design features along with the nuts-and-bolts details of heating, cooling, electric, and plumbing systems. The real-life stories of residents impart the pleasures, as well as the challenges, of day-to-day living. With tips on what to consider before you build, along with framing plans for a prototype small cabin, Micro Living is the perfect starter handbook for both dreamers and doers.

Kermit the Frog famously said that it isn’t easy being green, and in Living at Micro Scale David Dusenbery shows that it isn’t easy being small—existing at the size of, say, a rotifer, a tiny multicellular animal just at the boundary between the visible and the microscopic. “Imagine,” he writes, “stepping off a curb and waiting a week for your foot to hit the ground.” At that scale, we would be small enough to swim inside the letter O in the word “rotifer.” What are the physical consequences of life at this scale? How do such organisms move, identify prey and predators and (if they’re so inclined) mates, signal to one another, and orient themselves? In clear and engaging prose, Dusenbery uses straightforward physics to demonstrate the constraints on the size, shape, and behavior of tiny organisms. While recounting the historical development of the basic concepts, he unearths a corner of microbiology rich in history, and full of lessons about how science does or does not progress. Marshalling findings from different fields to show why tiny organisms have some of the properties they are found to have, Dusenbery shows a science that doesn’t always move triumphantly forward, and is dependent to a great extent on accident and contingency.

Joel Beath and Elizabeth Price explore this question drawing inspiration from a diverse collection of apartment designs, all smaller than 50m2/540ft2. Through the lens of five small-footprint design principles and drawing on architectural images and detailed floor plans, the authors examine how architects and designers are reimagining small space living. Full of inspiration we can each apply to our own spaces, this is a book that offers hope and inspiration for a future of our cities and their citizens in which sustainability and style, comfort and affordability can co-exist. Never Too Small proves living better doesn’t have to mean living larger.

You may be interested in trying out this kind of lifestyle but are at a loss concerning how to go about it. Don’t worry because we are going to look at what living in a tiny house means, the benefits and drawbacks associated with it, how you can start the process of living in a tiny house, ways you can use to utilize space in a tiny house and the factors you should consider when choosing house plans for building your tiny house. Basically we’ll give you the information you need about living in a tiny house to help you make an informed decision on whether or not you would like to try it out. Just some of the questions and topics covered include • Tiny houses and the tiny house movement • Debunking 7 myths surrounding tiny living • Financing your tiny house • Meeting the legal requirements • Designing your tiny house • Moving into your tiny house • Tiny house space hacks In this book, you will discover the step-by-step process on how to plan for the construction and completion of your tiny house. Find out how you can be absolutely certain that the tiny house lifestyle is right for you. Learn how and where to get started, including the breakdown of zoning regulations, determining your budget, finalizing your house designs, considering eco-friendly amenities and alternative energy sources, and gaining insights into its construction. This book is for curious individuals who are eager to join the tiny house movement, but would like to gain a deeper understanding of the process.

A New York Times Notable Book of 2017! Here is New York, as you've never seen it before. A perfectly charming, sidesplittingly funny, intellectually entertaining illustrated history of the blocks, the buildings, and the guts of New York City, based on Julia Wertz's popular illustrated columns in The New Yorker and Harper's. In Tenements, Towers & Trash, Julia Wertz takes us behind the New York that you think you know. Not the tourist's New York-the Statue of Liberty makes a brief appearance and the Empire State Building not at all-but the guts, the underbelly, of this city that never sleeps. With drawings and comics in her signature style, Wertz regales us with streetscapes "Then and Now" and little-known tales, such as the lost history of Kim's Video, the complicated and unresolved business of Ray's Pizza, the vintage trash and horse bones that litter the shore of Brooklyn's Bottle Beach, the ludicrous pinball prohibition, Staten Island's secret abandoned boatyard, and the hair-raising legend of the infamous abortionist of Fifth Avenue, Madame Restell. From bars, bakeries, and bookstores to food carts, street cleaners, and apartments both cramped and grand, Tenements, Towers & Trash is a wild ride in a time machine taxi from the present day city to bygone days of yore.

This book examines the growing trend for housing models that shrink private living space and seeks to understand the implications of these shrinking domestic worlds. Small spaces have become big business. Reducing the size of our homes, and the amount of stuff within them, is increasingly sold as a catch-all solution to the stresses of modern life and the need to reduce our carbon footprint. Shrinking living space is being repackaged in a neoliberal capitalist context as a lifestyle choice rather than the consequence of diminishing choice in the face of what has become a long-term housing ‘crisis’. What does this mean for how we live in the long term, and is there a dark side to the promise of a simpler, more sustainable home life? Shrinking Domesticities brings together research from across the social sciences, planning and architecture to explore these issues. From co-living developments to the Tiny House Movement, self-storage units to practices of ‘de-stuffification’, and drawing on examples from across Europe, North America and Australasia, the authors of this volume seek to understand both what micro-living is bringing to our societies, and what it may be eroding

'Pop-up' is a fully-fledged, new urbanism. Celebrated as a flexible and exciting new form of place making, pop-up culture includes temporary or nomadic sites such as cinemas, container malls, supper clubs, even pop-up housing and is now ubiquitous in cities across the world. But what are the stakes of the ‘pop-up’ city? Traversing a wealth of fascinating case studies, Rebranding Precarity shows how pop-up works to rebrand insecurity and encourages us to embrace precarity as the new normal. Revealing how urban crisis has particular temporal and spatial characteristics, defined by uncertainty, instability, fractures and gaps, it illuminates how those markers of crisis have been optimistically reimagined over the last few years, through an examination of seven logics that rebrand insecurity including within housing, labour economies and gentrifying areas. In doing so, it paints a frightening picture of how crisis conditions have become not just accepted, but are in fact desired, in today’s metropolis.

Am Anfang des Architekturstudiums steht oft Orientierungslosigkeit: Was ist wirklich wichtig? Wie gelange ich zu einer Entwurfsidee? Wie stelle ich sie dar und wie setze ich sie konstruktiv um? Die Grundlagenreihe BASICS bietet in überschaubaren Einzelbänden und thematischen Kompendien didaktisch aufgebaute Einführungen und präzise Erklärungen, die die wichtigsten Inhalte eines Themas Schritt für Schritt erarbeiten. Auf die Bedürfnisse der Studierenden zugeschnitten, deckt die Reihe die wichtigsten Themenblöcke ab: Entwerfen, Darstellungsgrundlagen, Konstruktion, Berufspraxis, Haustechnik, Landschaftsarchitektur und Städtebau. „Nichts ist selbstverständlich, nichts so schwierig wie es scheint und alles erklärbar – das vermittelt die Serie.“ Die Zeichenhilfe / DBZ