Forget the laneway house and its 500 sq. ft. of living space.
That size house is huge compared to something called the L41 — a house that measures in at a mere 220 sq. ft.
It’s designed for one occupant, and if its innovators have their way, it will house the renter, the retiree, the student, the homeless, the first time buyer, or the person who simply chooses to live small.
It’s the creation of architect and urban planner Michael Katz, and artist and designer Janet Corne, who created the L41 in time for the Winter Olympics, where it was displayed on the Concord Pacific site in downtown Vancouver. Today, the demonstration model sits in the parking lot at 550 Great Northern Way, nestled in a university campus among trees and shrubs that hide a major thoroughfare.
The house is called L41 because it rhymes with “all for one,” and infers “one for all,” which is the egalitarian philosophy behind it.
“This is what I call sub compact,” says Mr. Katz. “We concluded that to make a house affordable, we had to make it small, which is simple logic — The question was, how small?
“Instead of setting out to build a 220 sq. ft. unit, we set out to design a unit which we considered to be delightful. We started with a full kitchen and dining bar, and the rest fell into place.”
Ms. Corne, who is married to Mr. Katz, has an architecture degree and is an artist who shows her work at Buschlen Mowatt Gallery in Vancouver. The team collaborated on the design, but it is mostly the culmination of Mr. Katz’s 40-year career as an architect, innovator and urban planner. He has designed both the world’s first universal mobile keyboard, as well as a major resort in Hawaii as chief planner for Grosvenor International, the development arm of property owner the Duke of Westminster. By the time he settled in Vancouver in 1971, he went to work designing 720 sq. ft. townhouses throughout the city.
The L41 is a modular house he envisions to be used as either single homes, or more importantly, stacked up to make apartment buildings.
“This is by far the most important design of my career, because this is ultimately a mass produce-able house,” he says. “Up to now, the furthest they’ve managed to get is the prefabricated house and they’re not the same as the mass-produced house. It doesn’t use the miracle of the assembly line. All the pieces are prefabricated and then assembled.
“The idea is, just as cars were made available because of mass production, so too could houses be made available to a much larger number of people that can afford them.”
The stackable modular house is not new. Mr. Katz gives credit to architect Moshe Safdie, whose concrete modular units were a central feature of Habitat 67, at the Montreal World Expo.
“Modular housing has been thought of and dreamed about for a long, long time,” he says, seated on the foldout couch inside the L41’s living room that doubles as a bedroom. “The difference with this is that we’re hoping we’ll get pricing down.”
He doesn’t know yet what that price might be, and he doesn’t want to reveal the cost to build the demonstration house because it would be misleading.
“We don’t want people to get the wrong impression. A prototype is very expensive and state of the art. It’s not a fair pricing system. What is much more important is the next phase, which is now. How much will it cost to deliver one of these units to you?”
