Tiny houses meet a big need among Berlin's refugees
Trendy miniaturised homes and shops give displaced a base from which to start again
Troubled to see a long queue of asylum seekers shivering for hours on a winter's day outside Berlin's notoriously chaotic registration centre, Van Bo Le-Mentzel decided to take action. "I fetched my drill and collected some wood that I found randomly in the streets and brought it to the line where people were standing there bored to death and we just started building," said the architect. The end products were pint-sized playhouses that children could crawl into for shelter - and to break up the monotony of the endless wait. It also marked the birth of the so-called Tiny House University, a project bringing together architects, designers and refugees to experiment with innovative ways to house a population in need. "We are trying to create new kinds of housing forms in society in which it's possible to live and survive without having land or money," said Le-Mentzel. The tiny house trend emerged several years ago, largely in the US as people chose to downsize their living space out o...
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