Micro Housing
University of Sydney
12 – 26 November 2025
Students from the University of Sydney return to Aedes as part of a multi-year project that explores novel approaches to sustainable design with relevance in both Australia and Germany. This year, the students delve into new ways to design sustainable micro-housing on an adaptive reuse site in Berlin to develop models that can be applied anywhere in the world.
Task
This studio capitalises on the Berlin government’s plans for IBA 34/37 – a third iteration of the famous International Building Exhibitions of 1954 and 1984/87, which brought leading architects to Berlin to envision new housing models. Students build on these historic topics: how to design high-quality urban living, how to reimagine the modern house, and how to devise innovative responses to contemporary challenges.
Working on a site with an abandoned factory and adjacent open land, students investigate alternative models for micro-housing combined with artist studio space. Germany offers a compelling context for this inquiry: in the 1920s, German architects developed numerous prototypes for affordable housing during an acute housing crisis. Their ‘Existence Minimum’ – a study of the smallest feasible living spaces using rational planning principles – became a precursor to today’s micro-house.
In the studio, students are challenged to design as small, as flexible and as inventive as possible, exploring transformable, multipurpose spaces that blur the line between furniture and architecture.
At the same time, designs should be sustainable and students need to consider materials, systems, waste streams and connections to nature. How can we design the optimal artist’s live/work space for the future? How can architecture be more responsive to site and context? What kinds of spaces do artists need?
The studio examines the complex relationships between history, memory and design with the goal of developing a new housing type for 21st-century urban living – and contributing potential solutions to the global housing affordability crisis.
What if..
”Revisiting the radical housing experiments of the past could unlock new solutions to today’s affordability crisis?
Studio Coordinator
Prof. Deborah Ascher Barnstone
