“How to make reasonable use of urban grey spaces to meet the living needs of low-income people in the surrounding of increasing housing cost? How to achieve the functionality and mobility of the house in a small space? How to balance the relationship between mobile residence and traditional fixed residence?”

 

Yanqiao Yang has created a new system of urban mobile architecture as a solution to the housing crisis in both the UK and China. Yang’s research showed how difficult it was for those on lower incomes to afford decent quality housing on static wages, against a backdrop of increasing living costs. Inspired by Kisho Kurokawa’s Capsule Tower, Yang proposes three different forms to represent the flexibility and freedom of mobile living apartments. The first is the enclosed apartment, which is modularized with movable apartment boxes to form a new community by building enclosures in a way that users like. The second is the bridge type, which uses a single movable apartment box to form a new apartment form of bridge. This type can also be used to form a new “grey space” for vehicle parking. The third is the free combination type, allowing occupants to design their own residences and form apartments by means of modular composition of points, lines and planes. Shared space and public space (stairs, corridors) are modelled on a tree – with the trunk and branches as circulation corridors and the leaves occupied by the residential boxes