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Foldable Kitchens, Offices and Bedrooms Optimise Tiny Living Spaces
Posted by Gizmodo US Edition at 5:15 PM on October 2, 2008
In case you're one of those poor souls residing in a room the size of someone's walk-in closet, here's a sweet innovation from the Land of Lack-of-Space, Japan. The Kenchikukagu, designed by Toshihiko Suzuki for Atelier OPA, is a series of "rooms" that can be folded and wheeled away for easy storage. The line features a kitchen, a bedroom and an office, and costs about $7,500 per unit on Amazon Japan. Granted, I don't live in Tokyo, but if my apartment is too small to fit my bed and kitchen in it at the same time, I'd probably just move somewhere else. [Kenchikukagu via Complex]
Combining the tradition of building towers in clusters with the coldly rational American skyscraper, apparently you wind up with a tower that has been cut, twirled and splayed apart, resulting in a giant undulating W that's a single, continuous building masquerading as four wavy towers. That's the theory behind Danish architects 
Is it just me, or does this 
Fresh off the billions of eyes that have been on the beautiful Beijing National Stadium, Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron have set their sights on NYC with this incredible 57-story residential tower, unveiled today. It consists of 145 unique apartments that are stacked into the sky like a Jenga tower that's already been well-poked by a party of well-lubricated players. Especially when you get up to the penthouse level--if you're motion sick, you might want to think twice about dropping US$33 mil for such a beautiful place when you'll wake up every morning feeling like you're dangling off a cliff...
This room, located in an apartment in Hong Kong, features a central unit that can rotate 360 degrees with the push of a finger. It has different compartments on different sides, allowing you to basically rotate the walls of what should be different rooms to face different living areas. Want your TV facing the bed? Just rotate it. Want the TV facing the couch? Rotate it back. It's crazy and awesome.
There's plenty of room left to build in the world's major cities; we just have to be MacGyver about it. Because when one group of architects looked at an alley, they saw the perfect lot for a five-story building that's less then eight feet wide.
During my last move I took great pleasure in purging my home of items that were doing nothing but taking up space. There is something very liberating about a style that is minimalist and compact—which is why this Matroshka living concept is so interesting. Taking a page from the 
I suppose it goes without saying, but the "Backpack House" concept is probably the most ill conceived design idea ever. Basically, the idea is that the square footage of an apartment can be increased by hanging a 2-ton add on from the roof or the facade of a building. That means that users would have to crawl through their windows to enter a room that hangs precariously over the street below. Fortunately, the idea was intended as a work of art—not an actual means of increasing living space. Let's just hope it stays that way. [
The new "air-line" concept from student designer Daniel Fitzgerald and 
