Designer Michael Jantzen’s series subverts the suburban mega-manse.

We’ve covered big houses before, the death of the McMansion and the shifting scepter of suburbia (from monolithic American dreamlands to suburban wastelands). Designer Michael Jantzen’s series, called Deconstructing the Houses, caught our attention – as it has many – due to its eye-bending photo-trickery depicting fragmented houses.

Very cool, über-neat.

But what’s also inherent in his twisted and warped re-configurations of the American dream home is a broader statement about the sustainability of such behemoths. While the U.S. housing market is showing hints of recovery, Jantzen’s work calls into question, too, the feasibility of maintaining such gargantuan standards of comfort even in times of economic mending.

From the 1980s to 1950s, the average size of a home in the U.S. went from 983 square feet to 2,330 square feet – and beyond. This push for more space against the encroaching walls of reality (i.e., climate change, massive population growth, scarcity of resources, etc.) seems to reflect a paradoxical anxiety afflicting not just Americans – but every economy crippled by the boom that went bust all over the world.

Jantzen’s photos are visually Picasso-esque, but are perhaps Kafka-esque in meaning.

“Most of my work merges art, architecture, technology, engineering, and sustainable design into one unique experience,” he explains on his site. “I do not consider myself an architect, but rather an artist and inventor who often uses architecture as an art form. The artifacts that evolve from my work are not as important as their broader implications.”

Such as: the support beams. Where are they as the floors crack underfoot, the roof caves in overhead, the crown molding collapses, and the colossal crumbles?

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Narrow houses once filled the gap between urban overpopulation and practicality. They’re still practical, but also sleek, sexy, and very in.  

In a sobering departure from McMansions built on mini-kingdom parcels of land, the narrow house is enjoying a renaissance in both urban strongholds like London and Tokyo, as well as width-hoarding suburbia.

There’s even been a book written about the svelte architecture movement. Avi Friedman, author of Narrow Houses: New Directions in Efficient Design, explains that while narrow homes have been part of the urban landscape for centuries – for reasons including a tax breadth for wider properties and dearth of space in walled medieval cities – they’re once again being sought after for their environmental advantages, including greater land-use efficiency, less building material, lower utility bills, fewer infrastructure costs and an overall smaller footprint.

“Since the beginning of the housing boom of the 1950s, the size of the average North American house has steadily grown, while the size of the average family has decreased,” Friedman explains. “Today, a growing number of home buyers seeking smaller, more efficient residential designs are rediscovering a centuries-old housing prototype.”

Measuring a petite 25 feet wide or less, Friedman profiles 28 “infill” or “skinny” houses in cities and suburbs around the world. Meanwhile, here are eight innovative skinny minis that we found. After this, you’re going to want to put your house on a diet.

The Silver House in London measures in at 10 feet wide and 26 feet high. It was once a wine vault, which served the pub next door.

This jack-in-the-box in Antwerp, Belgium is 7’ 10” wide. It was created by architects Pieter Peerlings and Silvia Martens of Sculp(It) as a multi-functional work/play space, with mutually exclusive spaces for working, eating, living and sleeping.

The exterior of this Tokyo home bears a striking resemblance to a flat-screen television. In order to utilize the itty-bitty lot without squashing the house against the street, the façade has been tilted 63 degrees as a welcome change of perspective, while remaining typically Japanese in its minimalism.

This almost-anorexic apartment by architect Jakub Szczęsny is too-thin-to-be-true, for now. It’s still in the concept stage, a cold-cut sandwiched between a hulking tower and an old tenement building in Warsaw, Poland. It will be 60 inches wide when completed. That’s just a taste of what promises to be a very rich and stimulating project. Visit Home-Designing for the full scoop.

I’m 99% certain that I saw this home during a canal tour of Amsterdam, though I was in Amsterdam. You can never be too sure. It is the narrowest in the city, maintaining a rather strong, albeit willowy, presence among more stocky neighbors.

In this neighborhood, the “half” in its address (75 ½ Bedford Street) makes a minimal impact on the price of this house. Given the lineage, too, this lithe Greenwich Village gem is almost priceless. It was a carriage entranceway until it became a cobbler shop, candy factory, and eventual home to actor John Barrymore and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

The Sliding House is a truly stunning and daring slice of reedy architecture. You must see it to believe it. The house – built in the far eastern reaches of Suffolk County, England – has movable components that insulate it during the cold winter months, and slide open to drench the residents in the warmth of the region’s oh-so-fleeting summer sunshine.

The Holly Barn in Norfolk, England has a narrow base, but was built as a voluminous, fully accessible two-level space. The husband in the family suffers from chronic arthritis, hence the rooms and hallways are wide enough to accommodate the turning circumference of a wheelchair with subtle curves throughout. In all, it gives the illusion of width, but is less than 25-feet wide.

Images: Home-Designing; Boyarsky Murphy Architects; Luc Roymans; Home-Designing; craigatk; Karlinksi73; DeZeen; Architecture.com

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Dramatic downsizing is forcing us to consider a psychological shift.

I’ve lived in a New York City shoebox apartment, the kind where the bathroom is in the kitchen and the bed is above the refrigerator, literally. Back then, tiny was more of a price consideration than a conscious one. Nowadays, small is the new cool with professionals, artists, sustainability activists and Tiny House People vying for less (and less) space by choice. Consider it a backlash against the McMansion era, an unsustainable trend wherein vast swathes of suburban and exurban landscape were razed to erect prefab palaces for anyone with enough cash burning in their pocket, regardless of whether or not they could afford it.

Thanks to small space advocates like Treehugger’s Graham Hill, Tumbleweed Tiny House Company’s Jay Shafer, and George Jetson’s architect of record Nano Systems, this is the year of the smaller and vastly more environmentally considerate house that actually is affordable, in principal and derivative. But by constructing and modulating on as small a scale as possible, are we over-correcting?

Tumbleweed Tiny House Company’s “Weebee” model

Shafer’s Tiny House plans start as small as 65 square feet. That’s pretty tiny, though he’s living comparatively large in a 96-square foot home north of San Francisco in Sonoma County, an area known for particularly pricey homes.

Treehugger’s Hill crowd-sourced designers to optimize his low-footprint, 420 square foot SoHo living space, inclusive of a home office, space for two guests to stay over, dining area fit for a feast for 12, and a lounge space for eight.

The Cube Project

And now this, the 3x3x3m Cube Project. That’s the standard size of a backyard storage shed, a fairly major foray into the miniscule.

The innovative structure, a true shelter if ever there was one, is quite genius if you can wrap your head around the idea of leading with your left foot everywhere you turn. The house is meant to “generate at least as much energy as it uses,” and features solar panels, cork floors, LED lighting throughout, a composting toilet and an Ecodan air-source heat pump. It’s suitable for one lithe individual and includes a lounge, dining table and two custom-made chairs, a double bed, full-size shower, kitchen, microwave oven and a washing machine, too.

The Cube, which made its debut at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, certainly challenged onlookers to reevaluate what they thought they knew about compact, low-carbon living.

But it also makes one wonder: Is this level of extreme downsizing healthy on a purely psychological level? My Manhattan “studio” apartment of yesteryear nearly landed me in an altogether different bin. Dr. Mike Page, a Reader in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire and creative force behind the project begs to differ. He believes that addressing climate change requires as much of a psychological shift as a technological one. “The Cube Project,” he says in his mission statement, “is an attempt to show that many of the technologies we need are already commonly available and at an affordable price. The question is why aren’t we using them?”

We’ve certainly seen the average size of the American home drop after 15 straight years of growth, a reasonable shift in the right direction. I suppose that because extreme micro-living, a concept that is leaps and bounds ahead of logical down/rightsizing, requires such a dramatic shift in our cultural paradigm that it can leave some of us feeling a bit claustrophobic. But such a shift is possible. Ask any Manhattanite.

Image: The Cube Project

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