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With apartment prices in New York quickly sailing north of $1500/sqft, if you're looking to buy a place, it might be time to start getting creative. For more than a year we've been thinking about the pre-fab housing revolution that's taking place around the United States. No longer are pre-fabs the ugly, cheaply built units you might remember from your youth. These houses are something else entirely: modern, airy, and modular, so they're easy to configure. In New York, of course, the challenge is to find a spot to put your pre-fab house-- short of dropping one in Central Park, there isn't much open land around here. Unless you consider the roof!
Think about it: most roofs are underutilized in the city, with nothing but a watertower and yards and yards of open space. That's where the LoftCube comes in-- you just order one of these babies and have it dropped in by crane or helicopter-- then after a couple of days of assembly, it's ready for move in. Presumably, you are responsible for securing the rights to the roof and appropriate utilities and access. We like the look and feel of the LoftCube-- it's got an Austin Powers sort of 1960s vibe-- with rounded corners and floor-to-ceiling windows, which is perfect for taking in your new 360-degree view.
Think about it: why spend $750k on a shitty junior one bedroom when you could use that money to buy one of these and live like a king in the sky? [Related: check out Inhabitat for news on all sorts of architecture stuff like this, and read TreeHugger's piece on the Loftcube from last year.]
UPDATE: Curbed had an article about the LoftCube over the summer-- and they reported it's selling for about $100k (70k Euros, to be precise.) So you could spend $400k on the shipping, assembly, and roof-rights and still come off about $250k less than your average Brooklyn 1-bedroom. And you'd have the views!
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why does it look like a strong wind could blow this over?
I too have been thinking about the pre-fab option for a couple of years now, as the designs have gotten much cooler. In particular I like the roof idea for New York, but I'm curious as to what the logistics would be on securing such a place? Do you just approach a landlord and try to "buy" a part of his roof space? doesn't seem viable. If he sells the building, surely your plot of roof is in peril subject to the whims of the new owner. And this is all assuming one can even cut such a roof deal. I'd love it if that loftcube site (or Jake) would give us some links to info on 1)people who have actually done this, or 2)possible solutions on how to "buy" space on the roof of a building. The prefab house is the easy part. Securing the roof seems like the pie-in-the-sky hard part that makes the whole thing break down. Although I'd really love to do this...
Trailer Park of the Future??
This reminds me of Buckminster Fuller's Triton City concept. See this page. (Sorry, it's in Italian, but it has the best pictures of it. Use Google's language tools if you want to read a fairly good translation of it.) The first set of pictures includes two of Triton City. Ignore the pyramid, which is Tetra City, a different Fuller concept. Triton City was supposed to be modular. You could just take a habitat module and plug in into any space you buy or rent on the face of the city. Moving would be a lot simpler. Instead of packing everything up and renting a van, just have your module unplugged and moved with everything inside.
Maybe it's about time for floating cities near NYC. The real estate in NYC is just too limited. Too much demand and the supply isn't getting any bigger. Going offshore would open up so much potential.
Mike from Treehugger.com here. Thanks for the link! The loftcube is indeed better adapted to NYC than to most other places (except maybe for Tokyo).
i'd definitely buy something like this-- but i'd be a little concerned about the quality. you want something that has a little weight to it-- otherwise neil is right-- it'd get blown straight off the building.
Tell you what it reminds me of exactly. Alain Bublex' Plug-In City from 2000. An amazingly cool set of pictures showing just such a series of prefabricated living units being helicoptered all over the place:
http://www.galerie-vallois.com/fr/artistes/bublex/oe4.html