Moveable walls means bigger space in apartment

This is fantastic, I love this guy, Gary Chang.

I've seen sliding walls before - in the Gregory Ain housing tract in west los angeles, built, if I remember, in the forties. But not walls like these, which make so much sense. That video is a saver. Possibly transformative re building ideas. I don't know what others have been trying with this kind of idea, but it seems a big jump.

Love it. Thanks for sharing. Brilliant.

There's no way I could be organized enough to keep everything where it should be.
I'd end up sleeping in the kitchen sink.

Good evening, Talk72000. I have seen you on A2K before.
I would not stay up late waiting for responses to your thread. My good friend Osso knows a lot about architecture from a long career related to that. I also know a bit as an urban developer. We are about the only responses you will get.
The video you posted about the guy in Hong Kong was run a few months ago here. 330 sq ft. Pretty amazing.
I live in 1000 sq ft. I look at the wasted space. A corridor that takes up 100 sq ft, for example.
My architect has designed a 550 sq ft space designed for two people living in an urban area:
Bedroom: about 10 x14' = 140 sq ft
Living room: about 12 x16' = 192 sq ft
Kitchen: 10 x 12' = 120 sq ft
Bathroom: 6 x 8' = 48 sq ft
Utility/Storage: = 50 sq ft
=550 sq ft
The cool thing about the 550 is that there is a sliding wall between the bedroom and the living room. If the couple is home alone, that becomes a 332 sq ft room with an open kitchen (i.e. no interior wall ) adding another 120 sq ft.
Designers must think about kitchens, in my mind. Young people, I believe, no longer care too much about ranges or perhaps even huge refrigerators. Rather, they want counter space for microwaves, hot plates and George Foreman grilling machines.
That is my 2 cents here.

Huh, well, more are interested in this one, RJ.
Remember the years a while back that I incessantly posted architecture and land use threads? A lot of them flopped, but some caught on for a bit. I may start that again, not as incessantly, as I follow the same source, ArchNewsNow.com, plus other stuff I run across on news sites.

My husband and I lived in a small california bungalow for, um, 22 years - it was, for twenty of those, something like 575 sq ft., and got smaller when we remodelled since I knocked off the tack-on caboose room ( max 20 sq. ft) to put up an overhead trellis and bench.

An architect friend in LA designed some prototype 400 sq. foot homes - haven't talked to him lately to find out if they ever "flew".

Interesting point about the nature of kitchens in the coming years. I think I would hedge my bets in a situation like yours - have some with larger kitchen features and some with smaller as you mentioned.

edit to add, our kitchen then was 8 x 12 at most, so.. 96 sq. ft. That had a small stove and washer and dryer, and the fridge went into the room next to it that I used for a studio.. really a small room that was sort of a big hallway to the back door.

I have to look at the video again to see if I can figure how he worked out the movability of those wall systems.

Ever try using Revit Architecture by Autodesk. I just learnt it and it is very easy to use. You could design your own home in a week.

I get mixed up with you and jlnobody.

Nah.. I have designed my own home, big roll of blueprints, quite detailed.
I love to hand draft.

But never mind, that'd be helpful to people other than me.

I am quite untidy. I agree the guy is quite amazing.

I am quite sloppy myself.

The nice thing about the 550 we designed is that the moveable wall slides quickly between the bedroom and the living room. Parents coming? Bed not made? Piles of dirty laundry on the floor? Wall it in in seconds!

It's wonderfully ingenious...but it would drive me crazy!!!!!

There would be near intolerable push pulling to do for the simplest thing.. but he is also getting a lot of bang for his bucks in that space, big bed, etc.

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Really? You have an interest in this sort of stuff, JTT?

You betcha, RJB. I've designed a couple of houses and built many more. I love all things technical. I wish that the Home Improvement section was busier.

I love the idea of all living space made smaller and more efficient. I think it's obscene the size of houses that people build.

Cool. Osso was a landscape architect. She worked with building architects and urban planners often in her career. I have no formal training in architecture but I sure have learned a lot about it on the fly as I work on a couple of projects in my home town.
Osso and I were, a decade ago, the only participants on whatever thread she started about architecture or urban design. I am sure that there were others that saw the failure of suburbanization before she and I did, but we - or at least I - hopped on that wagon well before the housing bust.
I am an old fart, but I am surrounded by a bunch of young people. Some of them work for me. Others are architecture students who visit my shop.
There is a societal change going on, JTT, involving cars and life in the suburbs in the U.S. Perhaps not as much in your country.
The ramifications are enormous.

Ahem, landscape architects are trained in urban planning. Not with the intensity of those getting masters in planning, but enough so that we often had the words landscape architecture and planning on our business cards. I've several friends who have had careers at LA city planning. The bees in my bonnet are re mixed use: I despair about housing tracts being separated for dozens of blocks, even miles, from small bakeries, greengrocers, the likes of old corner stores, small cafes - Albuquerque being one of many examples of this huge phenomenon. As part of that, my second biggest gripe is lack of urban design attention to what I call pedestrian culture - traffic movement usually being primary (I could go on and on).

On designing houses, my boss in my first years in the field did a lot of house design as well as land arch, and I would work out a lot of the design details and draw them up with his review - so I learned a lot, but never did architecture school. This was all second career - wish I had woken up to my interests fifteen years earlier.

Agree with JTT re the immensity of houses, the ballooning of houses. I remember railing about McMansions at least as far back as the early nineties.
In LA, they were often peach colored monstrosities. A lot of neighborhood conclaves took place under city aegis to develop limits for height, etc., around that time. I facilitated one of those in one the city's most contentious sectors -
man, those were twelve trying meetings pre arriving at consensus.