Tiny Housing Bubbles
Apartments are getting smaller as big cities get more crowded. Kiss elbow-room goodbye
SOON ENOUGH, barring some last-minute appeal on behalf of protesters, Brill Place Tower will shoot up in London’s Somers Town. Its catwalk-slim presence will ruffle the neoclassical skyline of the world-famous, white stucco, early-19th-century terraced housing encircling the hallowed Regent’s Park.
The 25-story “microtower,” as it is described by its young architects at DRMM, is part of a $1.2 billion gentrification plan to resurrect a run-down residential quarter and is backed by London’s new mayor, Sadiq Khan. As London swells, huge numbers of new homes are needed, and with its many small yet well-planned studios and one-bedroom flats and its distinctive design, you can bet that Brill Tower will be a sellout.
The big question, though, is just how small urban homes are going to become as the idea of microapartments and microtowers catches on.
In New York this summer, residents paying from $2,650 a month moved into the city’s first microapartment building, Carmel Place. This Kips Bay project is the first fruit of former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s New Housing Marketplace Plan, but, however ingenious their design by narchitects, just how sweet is it to live in 260 square feet? What this nine-story building, with its stacks of 55 prefabricated steel and concrete units sheathed in a façade of gray bricks, offers in mitigation for minimal personal space is a form of communal city center: a gym, shared roof terrace, lounge and garden, storage for bicycles and a “butler service” so that fridges can be replenished.
In Austin, Texas, Jeff Wilson, a former professor of environmental studies at Huston-tillotson University, lived for parts of 2014 and 2015 in a 33-square-foot dumpster that was converted into a most unlikely home. This was partly a way of showing how space can be recycled from, well, trash and to spur new thinking about how much space we need to live in city centers.
His latest project, for which he is seeking developers, is Kasita— casita is Spanish for little house—a proposal for prefabricated, 300-squarefoot steel studios slotted into a frame like bottles in a wine rack. The idea is that it will be possible to lift these microapartments out from the rack with the help of cranes and a flatbed truck, then transport them to a new location equipped with an identical steel rack.
This notion of moving home—your physical home—without having to pack is intriguing, although you might choose to invest in a motor home instead, as many retirees have done.
One of the major criticisms of microliving, whether in London or Texas: What happens if a young single person meets another single young person and they produce a family? The answer, for now: They move to a bigger place. But however residents move on in life, many will leave their microapartments, resulting in ever-shift-
ing urban populations. Transience is one of the enemies of enduring communities. The more microapartments and towers there are, the more unsettled our city centers might become.
PLUG-AND-PLAY HOUSING
Experiments in microliving have been made several times over the past 90 years, and the results, while fascinating, are not encouraging. In the late 1960s, Tokyo boomed, and, as it did, young people and modest “salary men” and their families sought affordable homes in ever-sprawling new suburbs, commuting to the city in famously jam-packed Metro trains.
Kisho Kurokawa, a radically minded Tokyo architect, had an answer. His Nakagin Capsule Tower—a pair of interconnected 11and 13-story towers, in fact—was completed in 1972 in Shinbashi, an expensive office district today. Prefabricated steel capsules, 140 of them, were bolted onto the concrete towers. Each capsule squeezed a bed, kitchen surface, an aircraft-sized bathroom and the very latest in Japanese audio technology into 300 square feet.
A revelation at the time, the much-feted and photographed Nakagin Capsule Tower is in a sorry state today. There has been no hot water here for years. Most of the capsules are boarded up or used for storage or as makeshift offices, with a few Airbnb capsules to rent. Residents quickly decided they wanted more space than Kurokawa could offer, and the project failed.
Even sorrier than the Nakagin Capsule Tower is Moscow’s compelling Narkomfin apartment block. It was completed in 1932 to designs by Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis, with tiny modern movement apartments served by communal kitchens, a laundry, library, gym and roof terrace. This was to be a model of socialist living. Feminist living too. “Petty housework crushes, strangles and degrades,” wrote Vladimir Lenin in “A Great Beginning,” “chains her [the housewife of the capitalist era] to the kitchen. The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins… against this petty housekeeping.”
Josef Stalin, however, put a sudden end to what he called such “Trotskyite” aberrations. Almost as soon as the first residents—some of whom installed their own tiny kitchens—moved in, the Narkomfin experiment in communal living was purged. Now much tarnished, it is a sorrowful collection of empty apartments, artists’ studios and oddball enterprises.
Listed as an endangered building by UNESCO, this revolutionary building might yet be restored as a boutique hotel. Or it will continue to rot. When, in 2004, Yuri Luzhkov, the for- mer mayor of Moscow, opened the massive and grotesque Novinsky Passage Mall, he is reputed to have said, while pointing to Ginzburg and Milinis’s yellowing masterpiece, “What a joy that in our city such wonderful, new shopping centers are appearing—not such junk.”
“THE REAL EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN, REAL COMMUNISM, WILL BEGIN ONLY WHERE AND WHEN AN ALL-OUT STRUGGLE BEGINS…AGAINST THIS PETTY HOUSEKEEPING.”