Ikea's Copenhagen-based future living lab Space10 is a trip on a normal day but two Danish design students have just outdone themselves by designing a 500-square-foot tiny house that can be open-sourced around the globe and manufactured for less than $10,000.
Johanne Holm-Jensen and Mia Behrens were invited to perform a six-month-long residency project at Ikea’s Space10, a Denmark-based future-living lab to create the cheapest, most versatile living structure possible and to say they succeeded is an understatement. They named their project “Building Blocks,” and managed to create a fully functional micro-home for $192 per square meter, or $9,400 in total.
The keys to their breakthrough, a fully modular home that can be shipped at low cost or downloaded and replicated around the world, are twofold. First, the duo used a single machine, the easily available and cost-effective CNC milling machine to craft the home. Second, they used a single material in FSC-certified plywood, one of the most pervasive building materials used in construction today.
The design is intended to be made so that it’s easily downloaded in the public domain, a practice known as “open-source architecture.” Designed with flexibility in mind, the tiny home could be utilized as anything from a backyard writing cabin to emergency housing in regions around the world. Once an open-source designed is released, it can be freely utilized by anyone to use, modify or share.
The “footprint” of the design is just 49 square meters (a mere 527 square feet), which excludes it from most building regulations. The students’ remarkable structure is also modular, which means it can be scaled to meet different needs, ranging from a cabin getaway to a camp for hundreds.