Livingbox Competition Results
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 05. 9.06
We have been reviewing the entries and winners of the livingbox competition, and have decided to quit this gig and go into the gasket and caulk business. So many little pieces! We liked the clever pop-out system in Alessandro Baldo's prize winning abitare Mokka (shown above) but suspect the spaces inside will be dark and dreary- all the windows are on the pivoting sections. We found Renee Lorenz 's tie for first place to be derivative, but don't get paid enough to find all of the TreeHugger precedents for slice 'n dice prefabs. Third place winner Kim Minsung's scheme is so Moshe Safdie 40 years ago. But there were lots of interesting entries- bring your caulking gun.
Kadar Balint of Budapest developed a neat Swiss Army knife system that lets you reconfigure your space as you need it and fold it up when you don't. Bring your umbrella. We still think shipping containers make lousy living spaces, but TreeHugger hugs forCamilo Cerro 's tough, urban , dense infill project complete with solar panels, produce garden and edgy design. One of the few green projects we found- Bring your bamboo shirt and worn-agains. Vladimir Garanin should apply a job with Karim Rashid; Group Bosphorus did an elegant spin on Habitaflex, with a 3D core and foldout walls. Oleg Zenkov has designed the neatest one-truck pony we have seen- so much stuff come out of one box. Bring your copy of Robert Heinlein's And he built a crooked house. TreeHugger loves prefab. We love it because we think people can live in smaller, more efficient and sustainable spaces if they are well designed , and you can do that if you can amortize the cost of the design over a production run- that's what makes well designed products affordable and good architecture expensive. We love it because building in the factory is more efficient and uses less resources, yet so many of these entries were resource-mad. We think that maybe TreeHugger should run its own competition- for an edgy, well designed, small, sustainable and affordable prefab, because we did not find that here. ::Livingbox
I think I like the first one the best. Connect as many as you want together, and it can be plenty wide. The slide out wedges help it seem less like a living container. Also seems a lot more simple, less things to go wrong. The Bosphorus one looks cute too, would be the ultimate single person city pad.
I vote for Zenkov. So inviting, so interesting. I never get tired of looking at it and of imagining what it would be like to live in it.