Michael Janzen:
I’ve embarked on a little experiment. I’m building a tiny house that’s cross between Henry David Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond and a Tumbleweed-like Tiny House on wheels, the only difference is that it will cost nothing. Any money I spend on building materials will be recouped by selling discarded things I find and most of the wood will come from old shipping pallets.

tiny free house

Addressing the urgent need to green our built environment, Kjellgren Kaminsky Architects have conceived of a Super Sustainable City

that re-envisions Gothenburg, Sweden as a future-forward ecotopia. Designed as a dense and interconnected urban area, the master plan incorporates everything from green rooftop gardens to water and energy harvesting roadways, towering solar arrays, and soaring wind turbines. These measures address the issues of density, energy, and food production, while staying true to the city’s architectural heritage.

One of the smartest steps we can take towards a more sustainable future is to build denser, more efficiently designed cities. In doing so we stand to cut down on the materials required for buildings and infrastructure, decrease the distance residents need to travel, and provide space for the world’s surging population.

By 2020 the city of Gothenburg, Sweden will be growing at a rate of 8000 new inhabitants per year, and thus far the majority of this growth has taken the form of lateral sprawl. The Super Sustainable City addresses this issue by forming a dense city center that will house one third of the city’s growth until 2020 while forming a strong connection between each bank of the site’s river. The plan is inspired by the architectural heritage of Gothenburg, and will feature traditional yellow bricks, streets paved with granite, and plenty of markets and canals.

More at inhabitat

Earthship Design Principles:

1)Thermal/Solar Heating & Cooling

2)Solar & Wind Electricity

3)Contained Sewage Treatment

4)Building with Natural & Recycled Materials

5)Water Harvesting

6)Food Production

Some more little houses we like. Making a small house to live in using the cheapest materials is the best green house alternative for people with time and money constraints.

My first introduction to little houses happened many years ago. I saw a Japanese Tea House. The whole concept of living in small space, so common in Japan, was quite appealing to me.

Later on, as far apart as Amsterdam, Holland, Bangkok, Thailand, and Broklyn, New York, I saw floating homes.
The concept is quite appealing, but the costs can be quite hight.

Then we have the humble trailer/ RV / camper home
and it’s recent offspring, the tiny house on a trailer.

With all these examples, the idea that smaller is better and you can do it yourself started to blossom in my mind.

I also started becoming more and more aware of certain opressive regulatory forces in society.

For example-

The Smallest House in Great Britain

can be found on the Quay, in Conwy, Wales. It has its own entry in the Guinness Book of Records. This house is also known as the Quay House.

Its dimensions are 3.05 metres x 1.8 metres.

It has been lived in since the Sixteenth Century. It was even inhabited by a family at one point[citation needed]). It was lived in until 1900, when the owner was a 6ft 3 inch fisherman named Robert Jones. The rooms were too small for him to stand up in fully and he was eventually forced to move out when the council declared the house unfit for human habitation. The house is still owned by his descendants