New York City today announced the winner of its competition to design micro-apartments, between 250 and 370 square feet, intended to address a shortage of housing stock for single New Yorkers. The winning design, by three architecture firms, will become a 55-unit building in Manhattan, with each apartment constructed beforehand, like so:
The city will waive certain regulations that usually ban apartments of this size. This is the floor plan of a typical micro-apartment as it would change through the day:
The design is impressive, but we should note that other cities and countries have plenty of experience creating livable apartments with this much space or less. And the “My Micro NY” apartments are weak compared to this flat by TreeHugger founder Graham Hill, recently profiled by Gizmodo: