Micro Apartments ,The Future of living in New York

These 55 units will be New York's first prefab apartment tower and will rise in 2015

nARCHITECTS, who’ve been building living spaces in New York for more than a decade, designed the units to be a bit like a cabin on a ship--full of hidden details. Each unit is divided into a "toolbox," which packs a bathroom, kitchen, and fold-down table into a compact box, and a "canvas," the window-facing tabula rasa that can function as a bedroom, living room, or study. A juliette balcony lets in air, and over head, a step ladder leads to a storage space equivalent to that of a VW Jetta. The firm’s design will pack 55 of the modular units on site, with nearly half priced below market.

On Tuesday, Mayor Bloomberg--trailed by his perpetual entourage of news cameras--stepped through the door of a tiny but neatly kept apartment. He explored the model unit, which currently sits inside of the Museum of the City of New York, pulling down a trundle bed and peering inside of unexpected storage spaces. There wasn’t much ground to cover (only 300 square feet, in truth), and soon Bloomberg migrated to a podium to introduce the unit as the winning design in his AdAPT NYC competition, which seeks to imagine the future of housing in New York.

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