I love reading about architecture in the mainstream press, and the July 25 issue of The New Yorker has a couple of stories on our favorite subject. Paul Goldberger writes about Zaha Hadid and two of her buildings recently completed in the United Kingdom: the Evelyn Grace Academy in south London and the Riverside Museum in Glasgow (he digs them both). I was more interested, though, in Alec Wilkinson’s piece on what he terms “the tiny house movement.”
Wilkinson is clearly no convert to the tiny-house way–in his telling, designer/builder/advocate Jay Shafer comes off as a bit of a freak–but even this skeptical overview stirs longing in me for the simplicity of a dwelling you can build without a mortgage and park wherever suits you. And say what you like about Shafer, a self-taught designer and builder, in the past year he’s sold 1,000 sets of house plans and 10,000 copies of his book, “The Small House Book.”
