LIVING IN SMALL SPACE - Experimental Projects from Four Continents / Experimentelle Projekte aus vie

LIVING IN SMALL SPACE - Experimental Projects from Four Continents / Experimentelle Projekte aus vier Kontinenten
Susanne Tamborini
160 pp. with ca. 250 ill., 242 x 297,5 mm, hard-cover, German/ English
ISBN 3-932565-01-0

Glossy magazines like to show grand and spacious architecture – extensive floors, a sense of sweeping space. The large building is standard as far as taste is concerned. However: living-space is in short supply and it is also expensive. Many people still dream of their own four walls, even if it is only a mini-flat, a little house or holiday home, despite (or perhaps because of) the increasingly crowded quality of living spaces, it remains a central if privileged aim in life. Small buildings present a challenge for architects. Even in the smallest space the way in which people shape their personal lives, their individual possibilities for getting away from it all, is a big thing.

Living in a small space does not intend to provide any patent
recipes for the minimum amount of living space. The number of square metres is relative. The minimum itself changes according to local conditions: city and country, landscape and climate. Architects in Europe and the Far East, the USA and Australia illustrate, ambitiously and at a high level of quality, that a subjectively positive sense of space is more dependent on light and sun, air and warmth than on a defined minimum number of square metres. And that it is dependent on clever organization of individual needs, optimum use of space and on functions that are precisely tailored to the dimensions of the limited space.

Architects like Martin Wagner or Luigi Snozzi, Claudio Silvestrin
or Future Systems, Glenn Murcutt or Ernst Beneder open a new
chapter of exemplary minimalist solutions, comparable with Le
Corbusier’s Villa Le Lac, 1923, Gerrit Rietveld’s Schroeder House, 1924, or Gio Ponti’s »Dream Project«, 1939, which show Modernism en miniature. The more recent architects also make coming to terms with a small space into a manifesto of their personal view of architecture. At all time and everywhere the skill has lain in implementing social and functional requirements ambitiously in terms of aesthetics. Japanese architects in particular have made this into a fine art. They are a particular focus of attention, with buildings by Tadao Ando, Waro Kishi, Kazuyo Sejima, Hirosho Naito and others.

Susanne Tamborini studied French and German literature and
has been dealing with international trends in contemporary architecture for several years as editor of the specialist magazine md – moebel interior design.

• 58 €

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