25 SQM - A Family House
Housing issue has always been a central topic for a lot of countries, from the richest to the poorest ones. Industrialization, people´s welfare, crisis and, more recently, globalization and gentrification are all factors that have pointed out problems concerning the housing demands in relation with cities rapid growth.
Sweden can be considered quite an outstanding country. Representing today one of the strongest economies in Europe, and probably worldwide, Sweden nowadays has one of the highest housing standard in the world, but only from the 1990s a better picture of the actual output was able to emerge.
Indeed, the WWII forced public authorities by providing emergency temporary shelter for all the people and Swedish standard of housing was among the lowest in Europe. After that period different programmes of urban growth such as the Million Home Programme were held by the government in order to improve workers living conditions.
This represents a great success comparing to other countries´ failure but we thought that the Attefallshus represents an opportunity to experiment something different. Using as references cities where the housing demand was really connected with money issues, lack of space and sometimes culture (ex Tokyo) we tried to prove that a 25 sqm house can be big enough for a family (2grown up and 2 kids).
After a trial with different shapes we developed the one that, according to us, was the best in terms of cost and comfort. A really simple space, totally opening itself toward the garden and taking advantage of the blind wall on the other side, that can be simply arranged in different ways according to the people´s needs.
We are testing how the 25sqm limation positions itself in relation to possible use of the building. Should it have been 20, 25 or 50 square meters? Sooner or later this could probably become an option as the growing number of young dwellers are facing small living.
