Creative house design

This week we looked at house designs and drawing a floor plan. We tried to draw floor plans of our houses.
We did a survey on the number of bedrooms in people's houses and found that the majority of people in our classes have 3 or 4 bedroom houses.

A micro house in Tokyo

We thought about differences in houses, and reasons for differences. We looked at houses in Japan - especially Tokyo where there are so many people (more than twice the population of NZ!!). In Japan there are 'kyosho jutaku' - or micro houses -utilising small areas for living spaces. Architects need to be very clever with the design of these micro houses, to fit everything in and to give the illusion of more space.
This video of a micro house just 24m2 is fascinating - very clever use of space.

We looked at reasons for building micro houses / tiny houses, and the kids discussed their ideas of what would be good about living in a micro house, and what could be not so good.

This 9 year old is inspirational - she's building tiny houses for homeless people!

Many kids then went on to design their dream bedroom - so many creative ideas!