Posted on 05/02/2014 10:39:23 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
(VIDEO-AT-LINK)
Weave your way to the top covered-floor of a parking garage in Midtown Atlanta, shielded from heavy rain and direct sunlight, and you won't find cars filling the spaces between the yellow lines. Instead, you'll find three micro homes and a handful of outdoor patios, all part of a micro-housing experiment the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) calls SCADPads.
As city populations boom — the World Health Organization says 6 out of 10 people will live in a city by 2030 — urban planners are pressured to seek out wise housing methods.
"If you look at where parking garages are located in cities, they're usually centrally located; There are usually many, many floors, so they provide an amazing view," explains Scott Boylston, SCAD's program coordinator for design for sustainability. "It really transforms the way we see neighborhoods. The idea that the garage becomes a village — a community."
Three tiny, 135-square-foot homes are the focal point of the experimental parking garage community. They were a collaborative effort between 135 students, five classes, 12 staffers and three dozen SCAD alumni. Each home is designed for a continent where SCAD has campuses: North America, Europe and Asia.
Boylston says the project is about "re-imagining urban living," so there's also a grey water garden, two common areas with seats and outdoor heaters, and even a 3D printer.
A dozen students are putting the SCADPads to a test this month in Atlanta, including Jerome Elder, a SCAD design for sustainability grad student. Elder says his friends thought he was a little crazy wanting to live in a such a small space, but Elder loves being part of the social experiment.
"I want to live in a parking garage because there are so many out there that can be reused and re-purposed," Elder explains. "I think it's really interesting to look at these structures that we often overlook and think of them in a different way."
"I wanted to know what it's like to live smart, live small and live easy," she tells weather.com. "Long back, I did want a big apartment all to myself and a comfortable lifestyle. But after living her for 10 days, this is pretty much what I want when I start work."
Boylston says that was exactly the point of the experiment: to change people's minds.
"It's aspirational and intended to bust a lot of people's perceptions about what can be in a place like this," he says.
You can follow the students' experiences living in the small homes via Twitter and Instagram by using the #SCADPad hashtag.
(SLIDESHOW-AT-LINK)
SCAD opened a sister school in Atlanta. There are branches in Savannah and Atlanta now.
My small 780 sq ft apartment is the smallest I’d want.
People live on small boats. People live in RVs. Microhousing comes in many forms. The idea of dropping these cubes in parking garages has some novelty value, but the cubes themselves are not an especially radical idea. My question has more to do with the market. There is clearly a shortage of affordable housing in many major metro areas, especially in downtown areas. Why living pods like these instead of conventional apartments, which could be made just as small? As a practical matter, is this just a quirky design concept that, while feasible on paper, could never compete with conventional housing on the market?
I still wouldn't want to raise four kids in one though.
old parking ramps....lol...exactly what will happen...they will have a big party....few hundred will show up....at 180 per.sq. foot.....and they will die.
“People live on small boats. People live in RVs. Microhousing comes in many forms. “
The log cabins and sod houses of the early settlers were micro houses. Billions of people on the planet today live in one or two room huts or shacks.
By the standards of most of the world a public housing apartment or single family house in a American urban slum, that most progressives and government bureaucrats would call “sub standard”, is a mansion. About 40% of the planet’s population does not have running water in their homes. Over 2.6 billion people do not have access to modern sanitation. American’s who complain about affordable and substandard housing need to get a reality check.
Wait.....maybe they will have a dance in the community room...only a hundred or so...in the middle of a post tension span.
Yep thatl work
There is a SCAD campus in Atlanta.
https://www.scad.edu/locations/atlanta
Many here underestimate the popularity of tiny houses.
How big is George Obama`s “POD” ?
When Barry and Mooshele move into one of these, I’ll be convinced that they are sincere in their environmental religion.
Unwittingly you highlighted the chief problem with this latest socialist-utopian scheme.
Small boats and RVs both rely on external sanitary disposal services and potable water supply as well as temporary power hook ups. The bright young lights and their several dozen mentors in these design schools didn't consider that anymore than the Occupy Wall Street mob. Moms or the Great Surrogate MOM, the State will wipe their butts and clean up the messes left behind.
But the whole scheme hinges on the supply of parking structures built,owned, and maintained by others. Pure and simple theft cloaked in Good Intentions.
The whole "Design Problem" has its roots in the grand utopian schemes most popularly embodied in Le Corbusier's Ville Radieusse (sp?) which envisioned mammoth mid rise worker housing undulating like snakes through a green zone. High density housing concepts that brought us such places as Cabrini Green and others in the sixties, the breeding grounds of feral youth and crime brought to us courtesy of the Great Society architect, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
In the discovery of the Great Homeless Problem in the late 70's one design school, ever sensitive to the plight of the poor psychotics released from institutions noted the stolen grocery carts used by such were terribly inefficient for the storage and movement of these unfortunates worldly goods. Their solution? Design a better grocery cart!
Much the same here. Little socialist totalitarian gods in training knowing the best for the rest.
I can’t imagine spending an Indiana winter in that parking spot. After a couple days I would be ready to run into the street to get hit by a car.
Those places aren’t healthy. They decorated it up to look homey, they need to show one with no decorating.
Yuck
My first thought...
What about all these studies we pay for that claim people living in cramped, small, high density areas are the reason for poverty and crime ?
All part of the Agenda 21 plan to move people out of the suburbs and into the cities. A very, very communist idea.
See don’t these look like very cute FEMA camp homes?
Yes, you might think you could do that but North Dakota has no empty wareshouse space where it needs housing, afordable or otherwise. Well insulated, self contained units like this but larger are being used here, though. They are called man camps. While a practical solution to a temporary problem, city and county fathers strongly oppose them.
“If these could be mass produced, transported, dropped, and plugged in, there are all kinds of transitory housing/boomtown situations they could address.”
Kind of like the FEMA trailers after Katrina?
This book opened my eyes: Living Machines: Bauhaus Architecture as Sexual Ideology
As a child, I was very skeptical of human filing cabinets.
As a promo, they will offer them rent free. Look up stay-free minipads.
This certainly beats living under a bridge. Would a ‘mobile home’ be a lived-in vehicle with curtains?
For a bit more privacy one might consider a dumpster, large cardboard box, or a GM shipping crate.
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