Less is More: bigging up micro-architecture

Renzo Piano might be famous for designing the EU’s tallest building – the 310-metre-high Shard – yet he has long harboured a personal obsession with micro-architecture.

In the 1960s, while teaching at London’s Architectural Association, Piano joined forces with students to build mini-houses. About 10 years ago, he began developing a minimalist house called Diogene, which was featured in a booklet about him published by ‘Abitare’ magazine in 2009. Now installed at the Vitra Campus in Germany, this experimental house, with a surface area of just 2.4 by 2.4 metres, is named after ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes, who reputedly lived in a barrel since he deemed worldly luxuries extraneous. And, inspired by Roman architect Vitruvius’s notion of the primitive hut as the basic building block of architecture, it’s self-sufficient: it harvests rainwater and is fitted with solar panels. Its economically designed interior boasts a living room with a pull-out sofa and folding table under a window. Behind a partition are a kitchen, shower and toilet.

Piano is not alone in championing micro-architecture because he equates it with sustainability and rigorously space-saving interior design. Swedish architects Tengbom have developed a 10-square-metre wooden house for students with real-estate company AF Bostäder and wood-processing firm Martinsons. Co-designed with students of Lund University as affordable, sustainable housing, it’s made of super-strong cross-laminated wood (chosen for being a renewable resource) and incorporates a kitchenette, bathroom and mezzanine to sleep on. Two window shutters fold down for use as a dining table and desk. ‘Through this efficiently designed layout, the rent students normally pay is reduced by 50 per cent,’ says Linda Camara, one of its architects.

More space-saving still is Azevedo Design’s Brick House in San Francisco – a conversion of a boiler room, built in 1916, into a guesthouse. Measuring 2.5 metres by 3.5 metres, it somehow accommodates a living room, kitchen and en-suite bedroom. Original wooden roof beams inside now support a loft-level bedroom. ‘The project fully takes advantage of volume as opposed to just square footage,’ says studio founder Christi Azevedo, who added more space by installing a glass mezzanine. Leading to the bedroom, this is reached by a ladder onto whose lower rungs a kitchen worktop is slotted.

Finally, architect Yasutaka Yoshimura has designed a romantic, 3-metre by 8-metre weekend house for a single resident in Kanagawa, Japan. Its key feature is transparency: its two huge windows afford contrasting views – of Mount Fuji to one side and the sea to the other. The house is raised on concrete pillars to protect it from high tides; the space under it is used as a sheltered patio. Steps lead up from here into the house and its dining room and kitchen and, on a floor above, its living room and tiny bedroom.

Diminutive perhaps but micro-architecture has an appeal that remains undiminished.