loud paper

little green shoots

Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature, my follow up book to Tiny Houses, quietly slipped into the marketplace on March 21. No fanfare, just another title for the shelves, but slowly, over the last few weeks, momentum has built up and there's been some really cool publicity.

Over at the Brooklyn Rail, Helen Mitsios reviewed the book. Framing it as a study in personal utopias she writes, "The Micro Green homes resonate with another era—one in which people rejected the boredom of consumer society, opposed war, and organized protests to nuclear weapons." I think my growing up in Berkeley in the seventies is showing.

Details magazine put Micro Green on their Required Reading for the Design Obsessed list, calling it "an anti-McMansion manifesto." Which seems okay, considering that CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed also makes the cut.

I love that Wallpaper snappily calls escaping to a cabin in the woods the "full Thoreau." They also include a multi-page slideshow.

Finally, in John Hill's review over at A Weekly Dose of Architecture, he took a shine to the more DIY houses in the book: Michael Janzen's Tiny Free House and Derek and Dustin Diedrickson's Backwoods Skyscraper. These two scrappy projects are very much a little 'a' take on architecture and perhaps best represent the trend within small house living for a kind of hand-crafted agency.

I'll be joining the irrepressible Derek "Deek" Diedrickson in July for the Tiny House/Shelter Workshop in Stoughton, MA, which will be a howling good time. There is nothing quite like giving a writer power tools.

 

tiny revolutions

Last week, Derek "Deek" Diedricksen sent over his book, Humble Homes, Simple Shacks, Cozy Cottages, Ramshackle Retreats, Funky Forts, and Whatever Else We Could Squeeze in Here! You have to love a volume that comes with its own well-deserved exclamation point.

Deek's book is humble, Xeroxed in black and white with a plastic comb binding. This is no Lulu affair, but it is a great outpouring of passion. In about 100 hand-drawn pages Deek illustrates everything you need to know about building a tiny house. Some fifty projects from The Ultra Wee Tree House to the Hunchback Hovel to The Po' Man's Shower (you can be small and clean), are rendered with the comic book glee of a true zinester.

For me, each page is a mutant love child of my past year, A Few Zines meets Tiny Houses. I never imagined the two could co-exist, but Deek did. For him, a hardcore playing Eagle scout, the link between DIY construction and DIY publishing is seamless. And inspired. Without moaning about the ill winds blowing down both media and housing, Deek tackled his pages with 83 black pens, one after another they gave themselves to his one man revolution.

Deek lives in Stoughthton, MA and is at work on a scrap house (The Gypsy Junker)  in his front yard. You can follow all his doings and buy a copy of Humble Homes at RelaxShax.

size matters

Bright and early tomorrow morning I am catching a bus to DC for a book signing at the very cool design shop, Tabletop. I'll be at 1608 20th Street NW from 6-8pm, come on out for a glass of wine and some Tiny Houses.

And, speaking of small stuff, check out the October/November issue of ReadyMade magazine. It is all small all the time. I wrote up six of the finest small projects I know for their how-to section:

Richard Saxton jams out in a grain bin turned recording studio and bandshell.

Kyle Minor takes his office space into overdrive.

In their Barcelona apartment, architects Eva Prats and Ricardo Flores sleep inside the box.

Michael Janzen tries tiny on for size with the Tiny Pallet House.

Hartman Kable shacks up, beachside, in a shipping container converted into a pint-size shelter.

And the indomitable Susan Surface goes domestic. (Print version on newstands now!)

big visions, tiny houses

I am really humbled and totally thrilled that the good folks at l.a.Eyeworks invited me to sign copies of Tiny Houses at their Beverly Blvd store (designed by Neil Denari, with art by Jim Isermann). I love their Fiction frames and sport them every time I want to cop some big, chunky spectacle attitude.

I'll have my Sharpie in hand this Wednesday from August 12, from 5:00 to 8:00PM, at 7386 Beverly Boulevard (at Martel between Fairfax and La Brea). I hear snacks and drinks will be in attendance.

tiny in brooklyn

Please join me for a book signing for Tiny Houses this Tuesday, tomorrow, April 21 at Book Court, 7pm.
After two lively events in the Bay Area, I am happy to celebrate Tiny in Brooklyn.

BOOKCOURT
163 Court Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
(718) 875.3677
www.BookCourt.org

tiny tonight and tomorrow

Exciting news. I'm here in the Bay Area for two book signings, one on each side of the bay, for Tiny Houses. Join me for one or both!

Tonight! Tuesday, April 7 at Builder's Booksource in Berkeley and tomorrow, Wednesday, April 8 at Rare Device in San Francisco. Tuesday's signing will also feature a lecture/conversation about the little abodes.

Here are the details:

Builder's Booksource
Tuesday, April 7
7:30pm - 9:00pm
1817 Fourth Street (Near Hearst)
Berkeley, CA

Rare Device
Wednesday, April 8
6:00pm - 8:00pm
1845 Market Street
San Francisco, CA

More info on Apartment Therapy.

Also, I got chatted up at Dwell.com last week.

Look forward to seeing you.

in praise of modesty

Tiny Houses, my new collection of 30 or so houses all under 1,000 square feet, doesn't come out until the end of March, but it is starting to get reviewed. Designed by the good folks at over,under, the book is sweet without falling into cuteness.

And hey, Met Home, Preservation magazine (on the same page as Ada Louise, oh my), and Time Out New York all agreed.

And I love Gavin Browning's description of skinny Lucky Drops:

Then there is Lucky Drops, Atelier Tekuto’s long, narrow stretch of all-white reinforced plastic and perforated steel grating in Tokyo. This last space, a little too reminiscent of Catherine Deneuve’s claustrophobia-inducing haunted hallway in Repulsion, probably won’t convert diehard suburbanites. But most of the homes documented here are inspired and inviting enough that they could serve as blueprints for a much-needed national architectural trend: modesty.

traveling for tiny (or it's a small world, afterall)

In the early days of this blog I was obsessed with miniatures. One of my first posts linked to the tiny ceramic apartment buildings offered by the Bauhaus Center in Tel Aviv. Well, now after two twelve hour flights; a week-long press junket in Israel (a boondoggle, says a friend); and a visit to the opening of Calatrava's lovely, but not without a slew of issues, bridge in Jerusalem (pics); I have my very own wee White City replica. A model of the Bauhaus apartment building on Yehuda Halevi St. 58, scaled 1:270.

In 2003 UNESCO declared that the city of Tel Aviv a World Cultural Heritage site, owing to over 4,000 Bauhaus buildings which are spread over the city. Tel Aviv is a super-cosmopolitan and is quickly gentrifying. The same apartment buildings that spent the better part of the last century crumbling into themselves are now hot commodities. Changed development regulations encourages preservation by allowing additions and expansions. It is a weird trade-off and results are certainly mixed: some apartment buildings are beautifully restored, some still moldering, and others, with two or three new floor of construction resemble Bauhaus wedding cakes. Can I get a huppa?

For more of a taste of the variety Tel Aviv architecture, check out Open House Tel Aviv, architect Alon Bin Nun modeled the weekend event on the New York City shindig.

Doing the funky chicken:
On another note, can someone explain the chickens at PF1 (Public Farm 1)? Does poultry and dancing really mix anywhere except at weddings?

play time

Delve into the psyche of any architect of a certain age and you'll find a stash of LEGOs. The nubby, plastic modulars pack a default ironic punch. BIG’s take on the LEGO—“a homage to the Danish building industry” and commentary on prefab—is now on view at Storefront. Five housing project models fill the space, leaving not much room to maneuver. The twelve by twelve-foot, 250,000-piece LEGO model is pretty impressive and I am sure I am not the only person to find two, of the 1,000 LEGO people, engaged in a naughty activity. (I had to look. I grew up in the age of Slow House cross-sections and recto verso.)

Glowing like a shot out of Jacques Tati’s 1967 Play Time, the piece is described by the BIG team as: “…an elastic field of peaks and valleys. A thousand plateaus ascending and descending, separating and merging to form a fluid space of private and public plateaus. Combining the rigorous and the adventurous. The box and the blob.” Yeah. Those dirty Danes.

tiny bubbles

When I was up in Canada I didn’t get a chance to visit Montreal. Our little Subaru skirted around the civic center and got caught in some rush hour traffic. This gave me a chance to gaze longingly at the seemingly-abandoned biosphere, sitting as it does on a marshy area dotted with crusty 60s and 70s apartment buildings. (See drowning in culture for a hit of Safdie-esque détournement.) The Bucky dome, built originally for the 67 Expo, burned in 1976, but the bubble was restored in 1990 and now is home to, appropriately enough, an environmental museum.

Via Off the Fence, via Library and Archives, Canada.

I also missed an entry for my tiny file while zooming past the city. The a new photography show at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Naoya Hatakeyama: Scales features three series of images by the Japanese artist.

New York/Tobu World Square and New York/Window of the World depict scaled architecture models of New York City’s streets and skyscrapers. The photographs ape the high-contrast, modern tropes of photographers Berenice Abbott and Alfred Stieglitz, but also reveal the preciousness and artificiality of the models, and by extension, the fragile façade of the city.

New York/Window of the World
Naoya Hatakeyama
CCA collection

New York/Tobu World Square
Naoya Hatakeyama
CCA collection