Assignment

The first stage of our project was to design a house for a Gen-Y person. The second stage was designing and constructing a Gen-Y exhibition pavilion at the Minnesota State Fair. Before the design process started, the project team conducted a survey to uncover the most desirable features of housing for Gen-Y. As a result, we settled on designing a small, cheap to rent, eco-friendly, and easy to maintain house for experiments that has a highly flexible layout and many movable elements.

Super Wall

All fixed elements in our design concentrate compactly in the so-called Super Wall (nobody liked this name but it stuck). It housed the electrical equipment, plumbing, water heaters, closets, storage areas, stairs, etc. Even though the Super Wall is packed with fixed elements, it also has customizable parts. All shelves are a combination of different-sized boxes that can be moved across the entire wall to create different kinds of storage: for books, clothes, dishes, etc. It also has a unit with a foldout bed that can be moved to a different location or removed completely. The lower chunk of the staircase can be removed as well to free more space in the living room when the house hosts a party, naturally blocking the way to the second floor.

Everything around the Super Wall is flexible. On the first floor, there is a big space that combines a kitchen and a living room. The residents can structure their dining, working, and entertainment areas in any way they like to find the perfect combination that fits their needs. The second floor has two bedrooms: the master bedroom and the guest bedroom that can be easily repurposed, for example, into a study. Both of them have access to the big outdoor area.

Minnesota State Fair

Minnesota State Fair is the largest state fair in the US by daily attendance (230,000 people). It has many types of entertainment and attractions, such as livestock, food, machinery, shows, art, milk run, 4-H, and science. Our pavilion was in the Science section. For the State Fair, we had to curtail our design due to a very tight deadline. We kept the concept of the Super Wall that separates the public and private areas of the house in the exhibition version of our project. The house became a single-story building because the roof had been removed due to the State Fair’s fire safety regulations. I participated in the design process, but another team built the pavilion.