students

Taliesin West Miner’s Shelter

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Most architecture students don’t have to build their graduate project first in order to be able to live and study. However, at Taliesen West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter office and now an architectural school, students have to sleep outside in the desert in either a tent or in a shelter … Read more

Swedish Student House

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The popularity of Stieg Larsson’s books, and subsequent movies, about a certain tattooed girl has given rise to a new-found love of Swedish design. Sweden’s Technical Week website recently had a story on a 94 square foot tiny home that celebrates that clean design, but is also making a statement at the same time.

This experimental, free-standing tiny home for students has a kitchen, a bath with a shower, a corner office and an eating area with two chairs. A sleeping loft is accessed by a ladder. This home will rent for 30,000 Swedish crowns ($4,400) a year, when most student housing in Sweden rents for about 50,000 ($7,700) crowns a year. The country has a lack of affordable student housing and most seekers have to stand in line for an available place to live. This home will be rented out for three years to one person who can give the best reason why they should have the house.

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Kie’s Tiny House

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After following the various blogs about tiny houses for years, I finally decided to take the leap and begin constructing one of my own. As a 21 year old college student, this is not something that many other people my age are partaking in, but I felt that a tiny house would be the most cost effective way to live upon graduation and would give me the opportunity to pay off my debts from student loans as well as save some money as a nest egg for a rainy day.

I have always had an interest in construction, so my degree is going to be in construction management when I graduate this spring. For me, this was another reason a tiny house made perfect sense. In construction, you are generally assigned to a job and will work at it for a few years before moving on to the next job. The next job can be anywhere in the country. By having a mobile house, I am more able to adapt to wherever my job may lead me. This was very important to me because it would make very little sense to build a permanent structure when I may be leaving a place in a few short years.

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Baggins End Domes

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Baggins End, on the campus of the University of California, Davis is a small community of undergraduate and graduate students who live together in a bundle of round, white domes among several acres of community gardens, chicken coops, trees and flowers. Sounds idyllic, right? The students think so and are prepared to fight for their little slice of heaven. Recently, the university has determined that the domes are no longer safe for residential use and plan to shut down the Domes and Baggins End this summer.

The university’s student housing department said the Domes are not up to code, are not Americans With Disabilities Act-compliant, and not worth spending money on to salvage. Supporters of the Domes claim the university administration has neglected these issues for decades and is trying to make a land grab, motivated by budget cuts and pressure to squeeze every last dollar out of campus real estate.

Sacramento News & Review Article on Baggins End

Sacramento Public Radio Story on Baggins End

The Domes have been on the campus since 1972 and are constructed of three to four inches of polyurethane foam surrounded by a fiberglass shell. A few of the Domes are beginning to delaminate. Baggins End (named after the home of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins from The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy) is comprised of 14 domes housing 28 students where they emphasize cooperation and sustainability. The students grow a lot of their own food and raise chickens and a rooster named Chamomile. The Domes are around 450 square feet and contain a kitchen, living room, two bedrooms or a sleeping loft, heating and skylights. The students are allowed to perform their own construction projects and have access to the community’s free materials yard, fire pit,  garden and tool shed, compost pile, greenhouse and the weekly potluck dinners. Each resident pays $2,712 for a year long lease.

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A Tiny House for College Students

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Nearly 85% of college graduates move back home after they finish school. George Hemminger, who runs the YouTube channel Survive and Thrive in the New Economy, has a small solution for these “boomerang kids”: build a tiny house.