Friends Included
Micro-housing is housing with units smaller than 300sf and sometimes with what are typically considered necessities for a housing unit like kitchens and bathrooms left shared among several otherwise separate units. This typology upends traditional housing organizations and blurring boundaries between product design, architecture, social media and the sharing economy. These developments trade the usual promise of leased square footage for a carefully curated lifestyle that includes field trips, housekeeping, furniture and even friends. The speed and scale of this development is producing fundamental changes to what remains a basic building block of the city - the housing unit.
Second generation micro-housing developments contain units light on space and heavy on apps that promise social engineering on a new scale. Some of these apps promise to provide the perfect roommate, a full fridge, endless social engagement and 24-hour butler service. As one of the micro-housing developers Ollie advertises, housing now comes with comfort, convenience and friends.
The studio will explore and critique this housing type, which is being updated and renewed with attention from several sectors. It will interrogate the kinds of innovations in habitation that micro-housing hopes to establish, and unpack the relationships this new program seeks to engender amongst its occupants.