15K MAXIMUM HOUSE

 “The minimum house is a misnomer. It should be called the maximum house, for despite its small space, creativity makes the house seem open and spacious."    -Makoto Koizumi

A critique, examination and practice of the emerging phenomenon of “small home building” as an alternative to the indebting traditional single-family American home. The Maximum House addresses the need for a simple, quality, efficient home with an unbeatable price tag. Maximum House offers limitless living in a limited space. Housing that convention may find small, but has a hidden quality of bigness that is buildable, livable, affordable.

Maximum House celebrates housing as the most valuable design problem. Since World War II the American Dream has been to own a home of one’s own. That dream is slipping away. The price of housing is rising faster than the incomes of many. The current generation is the first to be economically worse off then their parents. Homeownership remains out of reach. Living in debt has become the norm. The fact of the future is more people on less land.
 
Small is not only beautiful it is mandatory. House sizes have doubled in the past 60 years while family sizes have shrunk. Today, 67% of Portland’s population is made up of just 1 or 2 person households.  Americans on average have three times as much living space as anywhere else. Five-bedroom houses sit largely empty in gated communities, while formal rooms get heated but unused for 364 days of the year. We are a nation obsessed with square footage, on the number of bedrooms and baths. But square footage is not a true gauge of quality, efficiency, or good or poor design.

The Maximum House is built for the world of now. It does not cater to the unachievable utopian dreams of architects. Instead, it projects an optimistic vision for high-density urban living that is innately flexible and social. Cities are where the majority of the world wants to live. The Maximum House allows you to live there too, but with no mortgage or debt to weigh you down. The Maximum House is an urban 21st century home, where working and living can co-exist, where domestic spaces are imbued with informality, with intermediate spaces, chance spaces, private spaces that shift easily to public and back again. We want the freedom to occupy a space with an unintended function and live in a home that provides a platform for multiple stories to unfold.

Small does not mean inadequate or uncomfortable. It means human, inviting, and cozy. The Maximum House is extremely efficient and compact, yet spacious. It encompasses all the domestic needs of a home many times larger. Small is the new large.