Places are usually defined by buildings, streets, borders, landscapes. And while Paris, the Great Wall of China, and the Grand Canyon are all huge areas, people's experiences of them are very small-scale. We move through large places slowly and come to understand them piece by piece. The amount of space that we take up as individual human beings is infinitesimally small; it is something that cannot be changed by status, ethnic, economic, or other. Even though we vary slightly in size, we take up relatively the same tiny, tiny amount of space.
However, we can change how much space we claim as our private domain and limit who can experience it, and when. Personally, I tend to think that people these days want to own far more space than is necessary thanks to the the kind of quantity-over-quality thinking that seems to be driving our society to the brink of implosion. Soapboxing aside, students at the Technical University of Munich have taken things to the other extreme, managing to pack all of the luxuries of a modern condominium into a 76 square foot cube. No joke.
I would LOVE the chance to live in one of these $96,000 miracles for a week. Probably couldn't do it for much longer, but it's amazing how slick this thing looks on paper...a remarkable amount of storage space, two double beds, toilet, shower, stove, fridge, LED lighting, and a flat-screen TV would make for comfy living. It would also be a great way to reevaluate how one uses the space allotted to them. To have a house that is only marginally larger than the space that one naturally inhabits sounds like an eye-opening experience. For the time being, most of us will have to live vicariously (there's that word again.) So make sure to check out the slide show.
Links:
Condominimum (Wired)
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