Capsule dwellings are in a way the architectural discipline's counterproposal to the development of the commercially successful mobile home. Making houses as manufactured commodities drove a host of proposals by architects. From an industrial design perspective, the capsule or dwelling pod would be an efficient machine, employ new methods, demonstrate new material potentials, and optimize each square centimeter of space. Inspired by modernists and their obsession with the Minimum Dwelling (1932), the capsule evolved as a response to housing crises, affordability and post war rebuilding policies. Conceptually distant from the more conventional mobile home, the minimal dwelling was hyper-designed as an entirely autonomous unit, adaptable to any context and as a complete work in the modern sense. Imagined concurrently to both the mobile home and the Levittown bungalow, capsule dwellings eliminated any traditional iconography, made place or context indeterminate, and increasingly borrowed from parallel industries, vehicular design or even space age design that idealized mobility. Pushed by post-war rebuilding and industrial automation, the metabolist architectural movement in Japan was the most obvious demonstration of the capsule dwelling and its aesthetic.
In the Prefabricated Home (2005), Colin Davies argued that this idealized representation of the house as a manufactured, mechanized and mobile product contributed to distancing the capsule's founding fields (architecture and industry) with architects moving toward an idealized and marginalized version of the prefab house. As the pendulum swings back in the direction of manufacturing technologies bridging both fields, we are seeing a resurgence of the architect-industry partnership. Richard Roger’s Y-cube, Kenzo Kuma's experiments with MUJI, and Renzo Piano’s Diogene Retreat with Vitra are just a few recent examples of the capsule anchored to contemporary lifestyles. The Koda microhouse, from Kodasema, frames this current segment's objectives. Similar to Kurokawa’s Leisure Capsule, the Koda series is defined and designed in its most precise details, but is not represented as a futuristic system as it conforms to present day design conventions. Separated by half a century, both proposals eloquently demonstrate the enduring obsession with the machine for living. Today’s dwelling capsule speaks to our connected culture combined with a nostalgia for a David Thoreau-like lifestyle. A union of these opposed ideals frames the integrated capsule as a wearable commodity, a mass customizable inhabitable and ergonomic skin offering a perceived simplicity with a complex globalized connectivity.
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| Comparative analysis by pre [FABRICA] tions |
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