Living Light: Part 1

Sometimes while traveling through the suburbs I feel like pulling into a driveway and confronting the owner of a cookie-cutter monstrosity. I could never actually do it, but I still formulate the hypothetical conversation in my mind since there is little else to do while passing through the suburban territories. I imagine that it would involve me asking the owner why he felt that he deserved such a large portion of what has been given to us, the inhabitants of the earth. Of course he has no answer, and neither do I, but this question begins the further debate which I like even more than calling out mansion-dwellers: What is enough?

What would be enough of a home for the average suburban bachelor or couple to live in comfortably? What does it have to look like? How many square metres of floor area would it have? How much of our material possessions would we have to find shelves and closets for? What can we safely throw out and not miss? What kinds of daily conveniences could we part with in order to live a lighter lifestyle?

I'm currently working with 75 cubic metres and trying to wrestle with all of these questions. I believe that this is a completely reasonable dwelling size for every day use. Of course I could make it a temporarily inhabited space, or a home in a temperate climate, or argue that the owners are so committed to this mode of living that they will use an outhouse or cook small meals on a hot plate. But I find none of these to be at all helpful within the reality that we need to find solutions for affluent North Americans who have high expectations of the value of their residences. This is the challenge which I am taking up. Small residences do not have to compromise their familiarity to average people nor their quality of envelope. They should be inexpensive to operate by definition. They should be simple to construct and durable enough to withstand our temperamental Canadian climate. Most of all they should be comfortable during all manner of uses.

The last thing we need is more modernist residences for artists and architects to photograph and objectify in magazines