Living in a high density area doesn’t mean to be crowded and never have natural light inside. Actually, this happens just because the houses we know and live in are designed wrong.

The Japanese firm Case-Real designed a house in Tsurumaki, Tokyo, that is rectangular at the front and hexagonal at the back, which means that sunlight continuously shines into the living room from dawn until dusk.

Although the site for the project had the North side facing the street and the other three sides neighboring the other houses, the client wished for a living room on the South side full of sun light. To accommodate this, the architect used a hexagonal plan that created space for additional windows which were set at 30-degree angles and not facing directly towards neighboring houses.

The house has a small parking space for a compact car, but also two bedrooms and a guest room, storage spaces, a balcony and toilets on each floor.

Find out more about the design on casereal.com.

Photo: Takumi Ota 

Living in a recycled shipping container sounds a little shocking, but it could be one of the most practical ideas if you’re interested in low budget, economical and unique spaces.

Artist Julio Garcia from Price Street Projects used the industrial containers to create a modern, stylish and minimalist home in the Savannah Woods, Georgia. His design actually blends into the lush scenery and it suggests that nature is reclaiming and healing the world.

But contrasting with the rough exterior that is left to the nature, the inside of the container home has a contemporary look with clean and simple open spaces. Also, the original loading doors were left functional and they can be open to bring the interior into direct contact with the nature.

Price Street Project specializes in building structures made from shipping containers, blending art and architecture to explore the boundaries of the traditional model.

We don’t need to worry about growing global population because innovators and visionaries are already working on creating underwater cities.

Designed by London-based conceptual designer and futurist Phil Pauley, the Sub-Biosphere 2 is an ultimate seasteading dream. It’s the original self sustainable underwater habitat for aquanauts, tourism and oceanographic life sciences and long term human, plant and animal habitation.

This unique underwater home sustains all its life support systems for air, water, food, electricity, and other resources through an innovative control of variant atmospheric pressures that occur at depth.

The Sub-Biosphere 2 has eight Living Biomes which allow human, plant and fresh water interaction, powered and controlled by the Central Support Biome which monitors the life systems from within its own operations facility. 100 people could live in these Biomes thanks to the hydroponic crops.

Forty stories of the Central pod will rise above sea level, while another twenty will be submerged. The individual ones will have ten stories above water and ten beneath the surface, creating a 1,106 foot (337 meters) wide complex.

A house for all seasons usually means one that is perfect only for moderate days and doesn’t protect it’s inhabitants very well if the weather is extremely cold or hot. If it is made for winter it will be horrible to live in it during summer months and vice versa.

But the D*Dynamic modular home designed by D*Haus can respond dynamically to its environment by controlled adaptation to seasonal, meteorological and astronomical conditions. The design allows adaptation from winter to summer, and day to night by literally moving inside itself. That means that the heavy external walls unfold into internal walls allowing glass internal walls to become facades, while the doors become windows.

During the cold season the house is in a square formation, with small windows and high thermal mass, but when the climate warms the house opens up allowing light and air to penetrate the inside of the building.

The house opens up to respond to the environmental conditions, much like a flower opening over the course of a day, this being another great concept that mimics nature. Also, the thoughtful design uses the solar radiation as a cheap and abundant source of energy. This energy can be used to heat spaces during winter, provide hot water and even generate ventilation for cooling in summer.