These Tiny Wooden Houses Are The College Dorm Of The Future (fastcoexist.com)

That's a pretty grim future.

It still looks better than my first college dorm.

I'm nuts about tiny houses so this has an immediate appeal to me. The interior is a bit too Ikea-ish for my taste, but nothing a bit of veneer or maybe some paint wouldn't fix. I thought long and hard about what it takes to build these earnestly and a lot of designs were style over substance. I have no reason to believe the two can't happily co-exist.

The interesting thing to me was the requirement that they last 100 years or more. It was my first thought when I saw "wooden" and "college dorm" in the same sentence. Colleges are long-term institutions and can (and should) make architectural investments that are long-term rather than short-term. A cheap throwaway is exactly the opposite of what colleges should do, although there are plenty of situations where cheap throwaway housing is appropriate, where short-term economics outweigh long-term economics in the buyer's eyes.

This line of thought brought to you by the superb book, How Buildings Learn, by Stewart Brand. I recommend it to every software professional I know. Sure, it's about physical things rather than software, but the principles are similar.

So long as you do not live in any place that has a high likelihood of Tornados or Hurricanes, i suppose this would work.

What gets me with this type of thing is the fact that your living room/bedroom/kitchen is also your bathroom.

Why is a tiny modular house the best way to build for several hundred people? Do they stack, or is the idea that universities in Sweden have acres of space waiting to put these on? Also, an initial test run of 22 units arranged in blocks of eight, how many blocks of eight does it take to arrange 22 units exactly?

Some issues I see with this particular design:

    1. loft access is very unsafe.  Imagine being drunk (college student, no way!), sick or injured.  How to get up or down those stairs safely?
    2. I see no water heater or place for plumbing or electrical access.
    3. I see no place for bicycle storage, etc.
    4. Having a small shower would be very nice.