Prefabrication experiments - 79 - Renzo Piano's Diogene retreat

Throughout the history of architecture, small buildings, furniture, cabinet making, garden follies and even jewelry have been objects and subjects of experimentation and a source of inspiration for larger buildings. The small edifice remains architecture’s enduring research project. The notion of encapsulating all of the practical elements of a grand building into an integrated micro-architecture was the modern architect’s fixation. The exitenzminimum movement exemplified the search for a complete mass-produced «machine for living». Le Corbusier, Jean Prouvé, Konrad Wachsmann and the list could include more recent architects, Shigeru Ban, Patkau architects, and Bernard Tschumi, all used the micro-building to innovate technically and spatially.

In the context of today’s growing tiny house movement, the architect’s fascination with tiny spaces has become mainstream. The tiny house is the emblem of an intensifying simplified living effort. Whether prefabricated or not, the tiny house reforms domesticity. Rationalising space, resource consumption and varying from 100 to 400 square feet these small structures require imagination to offer a vital minimum to their inhabitants in a diminutive form.

In the tradition of architects' interest in small fully integrated spaces, Renzo Piano, the 1998 pritzker prizewinner recently teamed up with Vitra, a Swiss family-owned furniture company, to commercialize his design for a micro-dwelling. Piano had begun this design as a side research project to design a minimal dwelling. The small all-inclusive capsule unit designed as «a place of retreat» offers a 7,5 square meter living space in an approximately 2,5x3 meter archetypically shaped unit who's systematic nature seems informed by mid-century capsule architecture.

The tiny house functions as an autonomous system. The concept is specifically technological as all energy is produced by the dwelling’s solar panels or wind turbine. Rain water is collected by small water tanks underneath the structure’s floor. The included composting toilet and recirculated water shower ensure the structure responds to basic human needs. The envelope is composed of cross-laminated timber panels clad in brushed aluminum. The structure could be positioned on a site with four screw piles to which the volume would be anchored.   Relations to the outdoors are kept to a minimum. The interior is more akin to multifunctional piece of built-in furniture offering little luxury but maximum functionality.

The Diogene portable dwelling