The house project with a total area of only 26 m2 was designed and implemented by order of the famous charity YMCA, which has been looking for an alternative to traditional housing for several years, the cost of which in the UK is very high, in order to resettle the poor and homeless who temporarily live in its hostels. Having conceived at the same time to lower the price bar by about 40%, the YMCA did not want to lose in quality, so the architects were immediately tasked with creating housing that is inexpensive, but energy efficient and attractive.
Y-Cube is an elongated parallelepiped covered with a sloping gable roof. The laconicism of this solution is compensated by the bright color palette developed by the architects. So, for example, the ends of an already made prototype are bright red, the main facades are painted black, and the roof is steel. Moreover, absolutely all parts of the building are prefabricated. In total, this takes about 8 weeks, and it takes another 1 week for the Y-Cube to be delivered and assembled on site.
The total cost of such a house is £ 30,000. For this price, the buyer actually buys a one-bedroom apartment, the interior layout of which can be quickly and painlessly "adjusted" to the needs of a particular family. However, the YMCA expects that most of these houses will be used as rented dwellings for a period of 3 to 5 years, during which the young family may well save up for more substantial housing.
In February 2014, the Y-Cube prototype passed all the necessary tests, receiving, in particular, the highest score on the Sustainable Housing Code system - the British building environmental standard for public procurement facilities. Now the YMCA is waiting for the implementation of two batches of 36 objects, which it plans to place at once in two districts of Greater London. Two- and three-storey houses will be “assembled” from residential units, and the resulting “sections” will form intimate residential quarters with a landscaped courtyard.
Recall that this is far from the first Rogers project in the field of affordable prefabricated housing: in the mid-2000s he implemented a similar village of Oxley Woods near London, and in his recent retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts he presented the energy-efficient Homeshell house, which takes 24 hours to assemble. …
