Last night we kicked off Tiny House Design-Build with an orientation tour, a welcome dinner, and our first session in the Main Studio. A round of introductions revealed that we have students from both coasts and two other countries. My fellow instructors – Patti Garbeck, Lizabeth Moniz, and Paul Hanke – bring a collective 100+ years of design-build experience. I’m pleased to be on the team as a tiny house dweller/connoisseur and a West Coast representative of the tiny house community.
Our students bring a variety of backgrounds from chicken coop construction, Habitat for Humanity, biology, visual arts, and architectural drafting. Some of them will be downsizing to a tiny house, but Julie and Laura have been traveling and living lightly so they will be upgrading from living out of a suitcase and a car, respectively. As they introduced themselves, students shared their partis for their tiny houses, which included everything from a Stanley hand plane to a hermit crab shell, from a tiny cast iron pan to a Leatherman tool, from a tape measure to a 3-way lantern.
Their tiny house dreams include:
- Ben and Jonathan’s cabins in splendid landscapes
- O.J.’s mobile design-build studio
- Julien’s wee mobile house for a family of four
- Apuyo’s boat-shaped art shop
- Cate’s stepping stone to her future straw bale house
- And many more…
Our first studio project was an exercise with found objects. In pairs the students spent 45 minutes modeling a structure inspired by one of the bizarre objects Paul has picked up on his wanderings over the years. It was fascinating to see what everyone came up with in such a short amount of time – and especially those precious last 10 minutes! Check out the Hello, Tiny House Design-Build Slideshow for some examples of their work.