Rolling Gothic
2003-07-17 05:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
archershipshttp://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/rollinggothic.htm
Tumbleweed-The Complexity of Living Simply
When I first set out to build a little place of my own I had no idea what I was in for. As it turned out, little houses are illegal in my town, just as they are in most other populated areas of the country. Minimum size standards have been established to keep small dwellings from popping up and lowering the property value and prestige of larger homes in America’s urban and suburban communities. To meet these standards I would have to build a house about three times as big as what I really needed. To escape them I would have to move outside city limits, away from my community and beyond what I consider a reasonable bicycling distance.
I resolved to put my home on wheels. The construction of travel trailers is, after all, governed by maximum, not minimum, size restrictions. So, three years ago, with a flatbed utility trailer as my foundation, I began building the tiny house that has since become known as Tumbleweed. I have lived here about a year and I am now writing to share my design, building and living experiences to date.
Aspiring To Smallness
The small scale of my dwelling was inspired in part by my concern about the impact that larger houses have on the environment. A recent study by the National Association of Homebuilders has shown that between 1999 and June of 2000 the average size of a new house in the United States grew from 2,225 to 2,260 square feet. New homes in this country are, in fact, fifty percent larger than they were in 1970, even though the average number of people per household has shrunk by more than twenty percent. Subsequently, the typical American home now emits twice as much carbon monoxide per day as the typical American car, sends more than a ton of construction waste to the local landfill and requires more than thirty times as much land per inhabitant as a home in China.[1]
Tumbleweed was built with only about 4,800 pounds of building materials – less than one hundred pounds of which went to the local landfill. It converts less than one hundred sixty dollars worth of propane into heat during a typical Midwestern winter and, at 130 square feet, it fits snugly into a single parking space.
But the main reason I made my house so little had nothing to do with saving trees or reducing sprawl. More than anything I simply do not have the time or patience for a larger place. Unnecessary space requires unnecessary heating and maintenance and the money to pay for these luxuries. Tumbleweed meets my needs without exceeding them. I like having everything within arm’s reach and not having to deal with the inconveniences posed by excess space and a large mortgage.
Design
Road Requirements
A travel trailer has to meet certain restrictions for highway use. Basically, every trailer over three thousand pounds needs brakes and lights (tail, stop, license plate, clearance and turn signals). Vehicles also have to comply with maximum size limits. The standard 8’-6” width and 13’-6” height restrictions can be exceeded with special permits and postings only on those roads where overpasses, telephone wires and lane widths allow for variance.[2]
My flatbed came with brakes and all the wiring I needed to hook up the required lights.[3] With wheels, porch and eaves included, Tumbleweed measures about fifteen feet long by nine feet wide by thirteen and a half feet tall. I could have easily stuck to the eight and a half foot limit for width, but, as I had no plans for towing my house up to the lake every weekend or making frequent trips with it across the country, I saw no reason to. Nine feet of width allowed me to cover the eight-foot wheel wells on my flatbed and have a few inches left over for eaves.[4]
Quality Over Quantity
While my place would have to conform to all the laws imposed by nature and the DOT for highway use, I was not interested in building anything quite like a standard travel trailer or mobile home. Travel trailers are designed for more mobility and less year-round comfort than I need, while manufactured housing generally looks too much like manufactured housing for my taste. Common practice in the industry (though not inherent or exclusive to it) is to build fast and cheap and then mask any apparent shoddiness with glitzy hardware and laminates. This strategy has allowed mobile homes to become what one advocate has called “the most house for your money” and has undoubtedly helped to make manufactured housing one of the most affordable and, thus, most popular forms of housing in the United States today.[5]
This is pretty much the opposite of the strategy I adopted. I put all the money I saved on glitz and size into extra insulation, the reinforcement of structural elements and simple detailing. At $42,000, Tumbleweed cost about one-fifth as much as the average American home.[6] That’s cheap when you consider it allowed me to pay it off before I moved in – but not so cheap when you consider that I sunk over $400 into every square foot. The standard $85 per square foot might seem more reasonable but I succumbed to the urge to invest some of the money saved on quantity into quality. I do not regret it but consider one of the greatest joys of a small house to be the opportunity to meticulously develop its every cubic inch in a way that is generally not possible with a larger space.
Creating Space
Fitting my entire material life into 130 square feet and mounting it on wheels posed an exciting challenge. It has been said that the perfection of a design will be reached, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.[7] This seems particularly true for a compact design from which all unnecessary space has already been eliminated. Any part not contributing to the whole of such a concise composition would be plainly detrimental to it. I made a list of the things I need to live contentedly and devised a structure that would house these necessities and nothing else. Ornament was pared except for where it was necessary toward creating a sense of visual continuity, and all connecting spaces, such as stairwells and hallways, were eliminated in favor of a small ladder.
I used a formal plan to order the space. It seems that nothing organizes quite like symmetry. The door, main room, heat source and other essentials were placed right along the center axis with secondary functions, such as storage and work areas, off to the sides. Since a place for one person really has little need for a number of separate areas I was able to keep the main room relatively large and open. This made good sense as this was where I would be spending most of my time and entertaining guests when inclement weather precluded the outdoors.
Aesthetics
Careful proportioning would be important to maintaining continuity. Because most of my building materials would be coming in four and eight foot lengths I chose four feet as my standard increment and made most everything an even multiple or fraction of that. This helped me save money and trees while naturally ordering the space. I used some simple principles of sacred geometry and looked at the proportions of the vernacular structures in my area for further inspiration.
Tumbleweed itself is nothing short of one hundred percent American vernacular. It is an amalgamation of some of the most common architectural forms of this country. Its simple exterior with minimal projections, an unbroken gabled roof and small eaves (all designed to combat wind resistance on the road) were inspired by the use of these elements on the traditional Cape Cod (designed to withstand ocean gales). Tumbleweed’s strict proportioning and symmetrical plan are direct descendants of religious architecture and the formal tradition. The foundation comes straight from what has been called America’s most modern vernacular form – the mobile home. Even the idea for Tumbleweed’s tiny scale, of course far from my own, was largely inspired by all the little dwellings made when and where use value, rather than resale value and regulations, determined the size of our houses. Settler’s cabins, campground cottages and some hippie shacks of the 1960’s and 70’s were particularly influential.
In short, Tumbleweed is nothing new. It is not the product of invention but of evolution – it’s every part plucked from the great American stew pot of common knowledge and common forms which is itself little more than a conglomeration of elements taken from other culture’s stew pots. Like all designs in the vernacular tradition, my place makes no apologies for appropriating the good ideas of others. Anything is fair game so long as it has been empirically proven to work well and withstand the test of time. By using only tried and true forms and building practices I have successfully avoided the multitude of post-occupancy problems typical to more “innovative” architecture.[8]
Life In 130 Square Feet
For me, life in a tiny house has been truly blissful. With everything at arm’s reach and nothing superfluous in the way, I have found a real sense of luxury here. But I am certainly not proposing that a house as small as mine is for everyone. I am only saying that the scale of our homes should be as varied as the spatial needs of their occupants and that it is these needs, rather than imposed regulations and conspicuous consumption, that should determine house size.
If we want to save our last remaining open spaces we will have to start building more compact living spaces. I am sure no one would argue that air pollution, urban sprawl and the squandering of resources should be encouraged, yet our current building codes actually insist on all of these. Minimum size standards may succeed in prohibiting the worst kinds of housing but these standards also prohibit some of the best. Perfectly succinct designs are being scrapped for less efficient ones in which otherwise superfluous space is added only to meet the codes and expectations of our prodigal culture.
[1] The official norm for China was recently reported to be 60 square feet of living space per person, though Li Dehau, Director of the Shanghai Architectural Society, has noted that the actual area inhabited by a resident of Shanghai is half that. Witold Rybczynski, Looking Around (New York, Penguin, 1992), pp. 57-58.
[2] The Motor Vehicle Enforcement Office in each state’s Department of Transportation will have details on these restrictions.
[3] I only attach my lights when I move the house.
[4] I have some friends in Fairfield, Iowa who are building a house on wheels with removable eaves. With some effort my eaves could also be taken off to reduce the total width of Tumbleweed to 8’-3”. But again, with no plans for extensive highway travel, I don’t foresee this as necessary. If more travel were in my plans I would have simply built my house six inches narrower and had protruding wheel wells.
[5] About one out of every ten houses standing in the U.S. today is mobile home. See Allen D. Wallis’ book Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes for eloquent answers to any questions you have ever had about the subject.
[6] Only about $15,000 of this total was actually spent as cash on materials. The remaining $27,000 is about what I would have paid for labor, had some friends and I not put in the 1,800 hours ourselves. That time (and the anticipated labor cost) could be cut in half, as I tend to be exceptionally meticulous. The cost of materials could also be nearly halved if more standard materials were used. A more pragmatic decision, for example, would have been to skip the $1,000 custom-built lancet window and install a $100 factory built square one instead.
[7] Antoine de Exupere.
[8] Frank Lloyd Wright reportedly said, “If the roof doesn’t leak the architect hasn’t been creative enough”. To me this statement makes clear what some have called the greatest fallacy of so much art and architecture produced by the twentieth century – the perceived need for originality.
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Tumbleweed-The Complexity of Living Simply
When I first set out to build a little place of my own I had no idea what I was in for. As it turned out, little houses are illegal in my town, just as they are in most other populated areas of the country. Minimum size standards have been established to keep small dwellings from popping up and lowering the property value and prestige of larger homes in America’s urban and suburban communities. To meet these standards I would have to build a house about three times as big as what I really needed. To escape them I would have to move outside city limits, away from my community and beyond what I consider a reasonable bicycling distance.
I resolved to put my home on wheels. The construction of travel trailers is, after all, governed by maximum, not minimum, size restrictions. So, three years ago, with a flatbed utility trailer as my foundation, I began building the tiny house that has since become known as Tumbleweed. I have lived here about a year and I am now writing to share my design, building and living experiences to date.
Aspiring To Smallness
The small scale of my dwelling was inspired in part by my concern about the impact that larger houses have on the environment. A recent study by the National Association of Homebuilders has shown that between 1999 and June of 2000 the average size of a new house in the United States grew from 2,225 to 2,260 square feet. New homes in this country are, in fact, fifty percent larger than they were in 1970, even though the average number of people per household has shrunk by more than twenty percent. Subsequently, the typical American home now emits twice as much carbon monoxide per day as the typical American car, sends more than a ton of construction waste to the local landfill and requires more than thirty times as much land per inhabitant as a home in China.[1]
Tumbleweed was built with only about 4,800 pounds of building materials – less than one hundred pounds of which went to the local landfill. It converts less than one hundred sixty dollars worth of propane into heat during a typical Midwestern winter and, at 130 square feet, it fits snugly into a single parking space.
But the main reason I made my house so little had nothing to do with saving trees or reducing sprawl. More than anything I simply do not have the time or patience for a larger place. Unnecessary space requires unnecessary heating and maintenance and the money to pay for these luxuries. Tumbleweed meets my needs without exceeding them. I like having everything within arm’s reach and not having to deal with the inconveniences posed by excess space and a large mortgage.
Design
Road Requirements
A travel trailer has to meet certain restrictions for highway use. Basically, every trailer over three thousand pounds needs brakes and lights (tail, stop, license plate, clearance and turn signals). Vehicles also have to comply with maximum size limits. The standard 8’-6” width and 13’-6” height restrictions can be exceeded with special permits and postings only on those roads where overpasses, telephone wires and lane widths allow for variance.[2]
My flatbed came with brakes and all the wiring I needed to hook up the required lights.[3] With wheels, porch and eaves included, Tumbleweed measures about fifteen feet long by nine feet wide by thirteen and a half feet tall. I could have easily stuck to the eight and a half foot limit for width, but, as I had no plans for towing my house up to the lake every weekend or making frequent trips with it across the country, I saw no reason to. Nine feet of width allowed me to cover the eight-foot wheel wells on my flatbed and have a few inches left over for eaves.[4]
Quality Over Quantity
While my place would have to conform to all the laws imposed by nature and the DOT for highway use, I was not interested in building anything quite like a standard travel trailer or mobile home. Travel trailers are designed for more mobility and less year-round comfort than I need, while manufactured housing generally looks too much like manufactured housing for my taste. Common practice in the industry (though not inherent or exclusive to it) is to build fast and cheap and then mask any apparent shoddiness with glitzy hardware and laminates. This strategy has allowed mobile homes to become what one advocate has called “the most house for your money” and has undoubtedly helped to make manufactured housing one of the most affordable and, thus, most popular forms of housing in the United States today.[5]
This is pretty much the opposite of the strategy I adopted. I put all the money I saved on glitz and size into extra insulation, the reinforcement of structural elements and simple detailing. At $42,000, Tumbleweed cost about one-fifth as much as the average American home.[6] That’s cheap when you consider it allowed me to pay it off before I moved in – but not so cheap when you consider that I sunk over $400 into every square foot. The standard $85 per square foot might seem more reasonable but I succumbed to the urge to invest some of the money saved on quantity into quality. I do not regret it but consider one of the greatest joys of a small house to be the opportunity to meticulously develop its every cubic inch in a way that is generally not possible with a larger space.
Creating Space
Fitting my entire material life into 130 square feet and mounting it on wheels posed an exciting challenge. It has been said that the perfection of a design will be reached, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.[7] This seems particularly true for a compact design from which all unnecessary space has already been eliminated. Any part not contributing to the whole of such a concise composition would be plainly detrimental to it. I made a list of the things I need to live contentedly and devised a structure that would house these necessities and nothing else. Ornament was pared except for where it was necessary toward creating a sense of visual continuity, and all connecting spaces, such as stairwells and hallways, were eliminated in favor of a small ladder.
I used a formal plan to order the space. It seems that nothing organizes quite like symmetry. The door, main room, heat source and other essentials were placed right along the center axis with secondary functions, such as storage and work areas, off to the sides. Since a place for one person really has little need for a number of separate areas I was able to keep the main room relatively large and open. This made good sense as this was where I would be spending most of my time and entertaining guests when inclement weather precluded the outdoors.
Aesthetics
Careful proportioning would be important to maintaining continuity. Because most of my building materials would be coming in four and eight foot lengths I chose four feet as my standard increment and made most everything an even multiple or fraction of that. This helped me save money and trees while naturally ordering the space. I used some simple principles of sacred geometry and looked at the proportions of the vernacular structures in my area for further inspiration.
Tumbleweed itself is nothing short of one hundred percent American vernacular. It is an amalgamation of some of the most common architectural forms of this country. Its simple exterior with minimal projections, an unbroken gabled roof and small eaves (all designed to combat wind resistance on the road) were inspired by the use of these elements on the traditional Cape Cod (designed to withstand ocean gales). Tumbleweed’s strict proportioning and symmetrical plan are direct descendants of religious architecture and the formal tradition. The foundation comes straight from what has been called America’s most modern vernacular form – the mobile home. Even the idea for Tumbleweed’s tiny scale, of course far from my own, was largely inspired by all the little dwellings made when and where use value, rather than resale value and regulations, determined the size of our houses. Settler’s cabins, campground cottages and some hippie shacks of the 1960’s and 70’s were particularly influential.
In short, Tumbleweed is nothing new. It is not the product of invention but of evolution – it’s every part plucked from the great American stew pot of common knowledge and common forms which is itself little more than a conglomeration of elements taken from other culture’s stew pots. Like all designs in the vernacular tradition, my place makes no apologies for appropriating the good ideas of others. Anything is fair game so long as it has been empirically proven to work well and withstand the test of time. By using only tried and true forms and building practices I have successfully avoided the multitude of post-occupancy problems typical to more “innovative” architecture.[8]
Life In 130 Square Feet
For me, life in a tiny house has been truly blissful. With everything at arm’s reach and nothing superfluous in the way, I have found a real sense of luxury here. But I am certainly not proposing that a house as small as mine is for everyone. I am only saying that the scale of our homes should be as varied as the spatial needs of their occupants and that it is these needs, rather than imposed regulations and conspicuous consumption, that should determine house size.
If we want to save our last remaining open spaces we will have to start building more compact living spaces. I am sure no one would argue that air pollution, urban sprawl and the squandering of resources should be encouraged, yet our current building codes actually insist on all of these. Minimum size standards may succeed in prohibiting the worst kinds of housing but these standards also prohibit some of the best. Perfectly succinct designs are being scrapped for less efficient ones in which otherwise superfluous space is added only to meet the codes and expectations of our prodigal culture.
[1] The official norm for China was recently reported to be 60 square feet of living space per person, though Li Dehau, Director of the Shanghai Architectural Society, has noted that the actual area inhabited by a resident of Shanghai is half that. Witold Rybczynski, Looking Around (New York, Penguin, 1992), pp. 57-58.
[2] The Motor Vehicle Enforcement Office in each state’s Department of Transportation will have details on these restrictions.
[3] I only attach my lights when I move the house.
[4] I have some friends in Fairfield, Iowa who are building a house on wheels with removable eaves. With some effort my eaves could also be taken off to reduce the total width of Tumbleweed to 8’-3”. But again, with no plans for extensive highway travel, I don’t foresee this as necessary. If more travel were in my plans I would have simply built my house six inches narrower and had protruding wheel wells.
[5] About one out of every ten houses standing in the U.S. today is mobile home. See Allen D. Wallis’ book Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes for eloquent answers to any questions you have ever had about the subject.
[6] Only about $15,000 of this total was actually spent as cash on materials. The remaining $27,000 is about what I would have paid for labor, had some friends and I not put in the 1,800 hours ourselves. That time (and the anticipated labor cost) could be cut in half, as I tend to be exceptionally meticulous. The cost of materials could also be nearly halved if more standard materials were used. A more pragmatic decision, for example, would have been to skip the $1,000 custom-built lancet window and install a $100 factory built square one instead.
[7] Antoine de Exupere.
[8] Frank Lloyd Wright reportedly said, “If the roof doesn’t leak the architect hasn’t been creative enough”. To me this statement makes clear what some have called the greatest fallacy of so much art and architecture produced by the twentieth century – the perceived need for originality.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-17 06:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-17 07:00 am (UTC)I absolutely agree with that.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-17 01:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-17 01:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-17 04:25 pm (UTC)But then life caught up with me and buried me with stuff again. Maybe when my daughter's grown, and I'm retired, and I leave my husband :)... I'll get one of these places.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-17 11:53 pm (UTC)I'm designeed a house which somewhat expands and contracts to the size of the family inside of it based on an segmented monolithic involute structure, eventually I'll post the info online.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-20 11:14 pm (UTC)Post your house design! I'd love to see it.