Manhattan is an island of barely twenty-three square miles and a population of over 1.6 million inhabitants. The explosion of young single professionals as the key demographic in the city has galvanized efforts to explore alternative housing typologies and curb the current housing crisis.
The Kips Bay Project is the most recent endeavor by the Bloomberg initiative to introduce the archetype of the micro-housing unit to the island. If successful, this new housing type will not only serve to cater to emergent material technologies, but also a de-stigmatization of micro-housing in general and the social apparatuses they deploy.
Colliding Domesticities attempts to invert the typical scalar design process in order to achieve this. Typically, as architects, we begin with the scale of the macroscopic; whether it’s an issue involving circulation, typology, history, material, contextual, etc. Colliding Domesticities, instead, decides to use the scale of the micro-house and begin at the scale of the microscopic (furniture).
By fixating on one micro-detail the project then allows design decisions to proliferate outwards and upwards in scale all the way to the macroscopic; essentially, reverse-engineering the design process. In a micro-housing unit the bed takes up the majority of the available real-estate. By deciding to position the beds on tracks that allow them to nest under adjacent units an entire genealogy of descendent design questions begin to emerge.
This is not only intended as a disciplinary investigation, but also one that caters to a desire for economies of space and design that will permit multiple re-purposings of a single space. This will be done in order to create a volumetric palimpsest upon which a dynamic array of living conditions can be deployed. Instead of a 250 square foot apartment, the user has a 250 square foot bedroom, a 250 square foot living room, a 250 square foot kitchen, etc.
