One Room Configured 24 Ways | Hacker News Reader

One Room Configured 24 Ways

nytimes.com

42 pointskalvin15 comments

Did anyone else look at that collection of CDs and think, "I could fit those in a couple inches on a hard drive?"

I noticed that too but the article addressed it by saying:

"Mr. Chang, a technophile who checks on his apartment with a Web cam while traveling, refuses to switch to MP3 files because he loves CD cases and liners."

It's why I keep my old vinyl even though I've downloaded the albums on FLAC. The old album art is incredibly detailed at 12x12 inches and an album cover like "Blue," a patchouli-infused sleeve ("Like a Prayer"), or a working zipper to Mick Jagger's leather pants ("Sticky Fingers") are all fun parts of the experience of owning a historical artifact.

Reminds me of the fold-away apartment Bruce Willis occupies in "The Fifth Element".

The first thing that came to mind when I read the title were the movies Cube and Hyper Cube.

The architect in the article Gary Chang has also written a book on his reconfigurable apartment:

http://www.mccmcreations.com/books/architecture/my%2032m%20a...

It is a great concept, but the negative is that it is fantastically expensive, probably at the top end of per s.f. costs anywhere.

Yes, but this is the sort of thing a market would be good at, finding some optimal tradeoffs between cost and flexibility... if a market could be created. I don't know inner cities well enough to know whether that is true.

If we're going to cite problems, mine would be that the concept probably only works with one person. With any more, everybody has to coordinate what "rooms" are available and the dependency graphs could be quite odd. Can I cook breakfast if you're sleeping in? Can I get to the shower if you're watching a movie? I would expect that even two people would be significantly inconvenienced and three might just lock up due to contention. Smaller, dedicated rooms may suck, but at least they are reasonably independent.

But hey, for one guy, awesome. It's certainly in the running for "ultimate bachelor pad".

Yeah, but you can put two of these multi-use spaces next to each other. His and hers :)

This is important. If this were motorized, it might enable software-controllable living- and working- spaces with random, dynamic reconfigurability.

haha. i can imagine the fights kids would get into trying to get the largest room or move the bear over the middle line (a la the movie brazil).

Brilliant. Borrowing storage idea from book/CD inventories I have have seen.

377 square feet. I still cannot understand why some people get 5k square feet for a family of 4.

377 sq feet is luxurious.

My apartment is smaller and my friends who live in Nagoya refer to it as Castle Patrick. (Half a decade of living in ~120 sq feet will alter your perceptions a bit.)

(P.S. And they wonder why I won't move to Nagoya.)

This goes out to show that we always take more than we need. I never lived in 120 sq feet apartment but I am sure I could manage.I hope in a near future we will live in smaller places designed to fit our needs. But I must admit that I would not mind being surrounded by acres of grass.

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