Now That’s a Tiny House – 1 Square Metre!

By Sarah Firshein | Curbed – Fri, Jul 20, 2012 5:30 PM EDT

Hey, Mayor Bloomberg, you and your new NYC “micro houses” (and other similarly sized 250- to 300-square-foot mansions) can step aside: There now exists in the world a house that measures one square meter. The aptly named One-Sqm-House was designed and conceived by Berlin-based architect Van Bo Le-Mentzel as a place where “no one other than I, myself, can decide what happens with this one square meter of mine in the world. It’s the only square meter in the world where I can decide what direction the window looks in, what direction the door opens in, what neighbors I have.”

It is no wonder that Le-Mentzel has become obsessed with the concept of home: He fled his homeland of Laos as a refugee and has spent his career exploring the topic. Now, thanks to the BMW Guggenheim Lab, the young architect, budding furniture designer and tiny-home aficionado can share his vision with the world. In conjunction with the BMW Guggenheim, Le-Mentzel invited Berliners to come and help build as many One-Sqm-Houses as possible, offering to cover the cost of materials for those who couldn’t afford it, so long as they allowed the Lab to rent them out until the end of July. For those who would like to rent one out, One-Sqm-House is currently listed on Airbnb for €1 ($1.30) a night, but when the experiment closes July 29, the builders can come back and retrieve their creations.