Rucksack House - Parasite Perspective – New views on the city

Perched between art and architecture, form and function, the Rucksack House is a walk-in sculpture with its own spatial quality. A hovering illuminated space that looks like a cross between temporary scaffolding and minimal sculpture. As mobile as a rucksack, this mini-house is intended to be an additional room that can be suspended from the façade of any residential building.

The cube is a light and empty space, free from connotations and open to its user’s needs. While still being inside a private atmosphere, one has the impression of floating outside of the confines of the actual dwelling above the public space. Folddown furnishings and a multitude of built-in openings on the inside provide extra living space with direct daylight. Sections of the walls unfold, with the help of hidden magnets, into a desk, shelves, and a platform for reading or sleeping. The Rucksack box is suspended from steel cables that are anchored to the roof or to the facade of the existing building. The construction is a welded steel cage with a light birch veneered plywood interior cladding. The outside cladding is exterior grade plywood with an absorbent resin surface punctuated by plexiglas inserts.

The Rucksack house offers a way of improving housing quality on an individual basis.It is a direct visual sign and reactivates the idea of the self-built anarchistic tree house, but one that is more prominently placed and structurally engineered. New space gets slung onto an existing space by a simple,clear, and understandable method.