Regular readers of the Advantage blog may have noticed that we’ve been focusing on innovative ways of tackling the need for more affordable housing in the UK in recent months.

This week, a particularly interesting prototype for building on tight plots from Brooklyn caught our eye. Dezeen featured this extremely narrow house designed for a mere 3.9-metre-wide plot. Designed by New York studio Only If Architecture, the house will make use of an unused plot of land between a pair of apartment blocks in Brooklyn.

Dezeen stated:

“Only If co-founders Karolina Czeczek and Adam Snow Frampton designed the house to be their family home and hope the design will become a prototype “for how to infill overlooked parts of the city”.

“The house, which is currently being built on a plot that is 3.9 metres wide and 30 metres long, is designed to optimise circulation and daylight.”

The architects have eliminated corridors and walls through a split level configuration where each floor has a single room to serving different functions such as living, sleeping and eating.

A void around the central staircase will act as an entry point for natural light and will allow air to circulation throughout the house.

The architects told Dezeen that using small or irregularly-shaped plots of land for building housing is a vital strategy to house a growing urban population.

“In the midst of the contemporary housing crisis, infill is absolutely needed as an urban strategy to produce greater quantities of housing,” the pair said.

Earlier this month, we looked at how London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s ‘Small Spaces’ scheme, utilising small, publicly owned pieces of land upon which to build affordable housing is one of a number of new strategies being used to meet the demand for housing in the capital. And we also blogged about how 76 new tall buildings will be joining the London skyline this year.

We’ll be back very soon with more construction news (featuring both large and small scale projects). Thank you for reading!