Anders Berensson Architects

Doorway Squeezed Office is a tiny building designed and built by KTH School of architecture, Master studio,” Out of Practice” co-founded and directed by Anders Berensson. The project is a collaboration between KTH School of architecture and AMF-Fastigheter having students design and build an exploratory full-scale project in the form of an office that can be moved and is small enough to be squeezed through a doorway.

The building is an experiment starting with twenty-two architect students building a typical Swedish wood construction to later rebuild and redraw the structure to fit a specific purpose challenging both Swedish building norms as well as ways to design and inhabit a small space.

Bellow you can read about the design and building process as well as the syllabus step by step.

Part I: A typical Swedish wood house that can be squeezed through a door.

Twenty-two students were tasked with drawings from the teacher to build a completely normal Swedish wooden house. Since the house would be built indoor and later be movable the outer dimensions was made just big enough so that the house could be squeezed through a normal doorway.

 

 

Part II: Out of Office.

After building the wooden house, the students were asked to rebuild the house into a suitable function for an office that could offer a complement to what today’s office might lack after the pandemic. Students then redesigned the house into a phone/video meeting/rest room with a focus on changing the environment from a normal office environment into something darker and calmer and perhaps more natural.  The main idea was to provide a variation in impression, working position, light and sound conditions that the students felt existed while working from home during the pandemic but not offered in school or an office space.

 

Part III: Build to draw.

Based on a common design, the students were then divided into four different groups to study in detail and build four different parts of the house. The four teams where a roof team, a façade team, an interior team, and an entrance and movability team.  Each team then developed its own concept for what their part of the building should do and look like.

 

The roof team made a wood construction that lets the light into the building as well as holding a low-tech sprinkler system consisting of plastic bags filled with water that burst when exposed by a fire.

The exterior team soon found out that a normal insulated building this small was way to isolated if using standard Swedish insulation. Instead, they processed Swedish wool into an external insulation that also became the house façade.

The entrance and movability team focus on making an easy to move structure as well as creating an entrance that explain the ritual of entering the house leaving your shoes in a custom-made shoe shelve.

The interior team experimented on how to use the small space by designing an interior where one can squeezed oneself into a blueberry colored puffy coffin. The team also cladded the interior with mirrors to make the space appear bigger from some angels.