Parking Bay Apartment: Tikku Lifestyle

Brief: design an apartment that can fit inside a parking bay; reply: 'no problem'. Big problem: have you ever seen one before; is this even possible?

Designed by Finland's Casagrande Laboratory, this micro apartment is everything micro and not much apartment (more, urban cave). Located in Helsinki (Finland), this apartment unit measures just 2.5 metres x 5 metres and has been named Tikku. A safe-house for neo-archaic biourbanism, a contemporary cave for a modern urban nomad, the Tikku apartment will offer privacy, safety and comfort, and the concept is that all the rest of living functions can be found in the surrounding city. A needle of urban acupuncture, conquering the no-man's land from the cars and tuning the city towards the organic, it is conceived that many Tikkus can become built side-by-side like mushrooms and they can fuse together into larger organisms, or even standalone city districts.

Self-sufficient, each Tikku produces its own energy via solar panels and even features dry toilets. Freshwater is carried in, and showers, saunas, laundry machines and food should be accessible in the near vicinity. As the architect idealises, 'Modern man has to die a bit in order to be reborn.'

Manufactured from CLT cross-laminated timber spatial modules that are 5 times lighter than reinforced concrete to enable the apartment to be erected on-site overnight, the featuring of a concrete slab and sandbox beneath its base will enable no foundations to ever be required, truly making the Tikku as temporary or as permanent as desired. Offering floorspace on three levels, the showcase apartment features a bedroom, working space and green-house, however due to modularity, could easily be redesigned into any one of a shop, kitchen, sauna, dojo, workshop, hotel-room etc. Discover more about the architects online at: CasagrandeLaboratory.com