Tiny House Movement

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Building permission and street legal Tiny House under German law

The Tiny House Movement (also known as the Small House Movement , English movement for tiny houses ) is a social movement with origins in the USA that propagates life in small houses. The movement is also expressed in architecture, as small and mini houses are increasingly being planned and implemented, although there is no fixed definition of the size of the living space up to which a building can be classified as a tiny house (micro or mini house) and from when it is a small one House (small house) is called. Tiny houses are mostly described between 15 and 45 m² and small homes with up to 90 m² living space.

background

American Tiny House on Wheels in Olympia, Washington

Although the number of people living together in one household has generally declined in demographic terms in many industrialized nations, the size of newly built single-family houses has increased in some of these countries. In the USA, for example, the average living space of single-family homes rose from 165 m² in 1978 to 230.3 m² in 2007. One reason for this was increased material wealth. Single-family houses can also be a status symbol , i.e. express the social status of their tenants or owners. Small or tiny houses, on the other hand, have significantly low construction and running costs. This is one of the reasons why the Small House Movement has received increased attention since the financial crisis from 2007 onwards .

The development of mini houses covers a wide range of users and residents. It ranges from simple construction, shepherd and circus wagons built or converted by the residents to high-quality and professionally built models.

The Tiny House Movement is mostly associated with downsizing or downsizing . While the origin can primarily be seen in a necessary cost reduction , the reasons for the decision in countries such as the USA, but also in Germany, have primarily developed in the direction of sustainable living and living. But higher-income groups of the population are also increasingly using tiny houses as guest houses or as weekend homes. Some companies use tiny houses as business or trade fair offices.

The beginning of the counter-movement to "Bigger is better" is attributed to Sarah Susanka. Susanka (* 1957), an architect from England and living in the USA, published the book The Not So Big House - A Blueprint For the Way We Really Live in 1997 . The Small House Movement spread in other countries: In Tokyo , where land is extremely expensive, the architect built Takaharu Tezuka the House to Catch the Sky ( English "The house that captures the sky"), a 42.5 m² small house for four people; in Barcelona, ​​the Spanish architects Eva Prats and Ricardo Flores presented the 28 m² small Casa en una Maleta ( Spanish for "house in a suitcase"); After the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, Marianne Cusato , an American designer, developed the Katrina Cottages with 28.6 m² of living space as an alternative to the FEMA trailers (emergency accommodation that the Federal Emergency Management Agency makes available to the hurricane victims) .

As the voice of the Tiny House Movement , the Small House Society , an association founded in 2002, sees its mission as promoting the research, development and use of smaller living spaces, which are intended to promote sustainable living for individuals, families and communities around the world.

Tiny Houses in Germany

The original trailer from the show Löwenzahn on the premises of the Babelsberg Film Park
Example of a non-mobile tiny house
m-ch s in the student town of Freimann

Tiny Houses were given positive connotations in Germany as early as the 1980s by the children's television program Löwenzahn , in which the main actor Peter Lustig and the film character Fritz Fuchs lived in a converted construction trailer.

While US tiny houses often do not receive approval under German or European law, numerous manufacturers in Germany and the European Union now offer some very individual European versions of tiny houses.

The group of users in Germany can basically be divided into the following groups:

  1. People who want to reduce their effort in terms of the size of the living space, the land area and the associated costs
  2. Working people or students who need temporary accommodation in another location
  3. Households who want to use a tiny house as a holiday home or weekend home
  4. Self-employed and traders who want to use tiny houses as offices, staff apartments or as a holiday home for commercial purposes.

In stark contrast to the USA, there are extensive legal requirements in Germany that must be met when using tiny houses. This applies to use on public roads as well as for residential or commercial purposes.

Mobile Tiny Houses in Germany generally require road traffic approval from a competent body such as TÜV or DEKRA . This is mostly done as a trailer with a special body . A declaration as removable cargo is also possible. Without road traffic approval, mobile tiny houses may not be moved on public roads, or only at a significantly reduced speed, unless they are transported on suitable trucks. In addition, every manufacturer of a tiny house is responsible for the static reliability under road traffic conditions.

The building permit depends on the type of use. If a tiny house is used as a residential, holiday or weekend home, the necessary building permit must be obtained. This can be granted for both permanent and temporary use, provided that the location is on an area planned or approved by the respective municipality for this purpose. These usually include housing estates, mixed areas, but also specially designated areas for holiday homes or weekend homes. In Germany, permanent occupation outside of the interior areas under building law is generally only permitted for agriculture and comparable other uses that are dependent on the exterior area. Under certain circumstances, Tiny Houses can be built on individual farmsteads, for example if it can be proven that their residents are active in agriculture or forestry (e.g. as a sideline fruit grower ). The building law requirements also include the building owner ensuring and verifying that the residential unit is supplied with electricity, water, sewage and garbage disposal.

The building owner or the manufacturer is generally liable for the structural engineering, both for use as an enclosed space and for use on the street, which is proven in the form of a statics by an architect, an approved test engineer or a master craftsman in the main construction trade . If the basic construction of a tiny house is defined as a wooden house, special fire protection requirements for the electrical systems must also be observed.

A special exception under building law is a campsite , on which a tiny house may be set up without an explicit building permit. The other conditions, also with regard to permanent residence or use as a primary or second residence, are regulated by the camping ordinance of the respective federal state or, if such does not exist, the specifications of the respective municipal facilities.

The micro compact home (m-ch) developed at the Munich School of Architecture and exhibited in the MoMA in 2008 caused a stir .

Ecology and sustainability

Often reference is made to the use of ecological building materials such as wood and, as insulation, sheep's wool, hemp or seaweed as well as other recycled or recyclable building materials. In this way, value should be placed on the careful use of available resources. However, it is more difficult with ecological insulation than with conventional insulation to meet the requirements of the Energy Saving Ordinance (EnEv), which can be required when applying for a building permit even for small residential buildings with less than 50 m².

On the one hand, it is possible to meet the requirements with thicker walls; on the other hand, reference is made to structurally thin exterior walls, floors and ceilings, which in principle cannot provide sufficient insulation. Meaningful sustainability is then bought in the long term with significantly increased energy consumption. Therefore, priority should be given to sustainability over the use of ecological materials and highly insulating materials such as XPS (extruded polystyrene rigid foam), PUR ( polyurethane ) or special heat-reflecting insulation films should be used.

Heating systems such as log fireplaces are usually not designed for the small volume of space in tiny houses, are accordingly oversized and can hardly be regulated in an energy-conscious manner in terms of temperature. Like every fireplace, a wood fireplace in a tiny house must be approved by the building owner by the responsible district chimney sweep before it is put into operation and then regularly checked. The exact provisions as well as the use of filter systems are regulated by the building regulations of the respective federal states. Modern electronically controlled pellet stoves can represent alternatives in terms of sustainability.

Energy systems, which are supposed to offer a certain independence or self-sufficiency from public supply systems, play a special role in tiny houses.

So may rainwater quite collected and used for watering the garden or for flushing toilets. Lines for drinking water and rainwater must be clearly separated from one another and permanently marked in color. The use of rainwater as drinking water is generally prohibited in Germany.

The treatment of wastewater through domestic or small wastewater treatment plants and the discharge of wastewater into surface water or the groundwater are basically possible and subject to approval, unless the responsible municipality has a general obligation to connect to the public sewage system.

With photovoltaic systems , in isolated operation of a tiny house - similar to a caravan - a minimum requirement for electricity can be generated independently of public power grids. The roof area of ​​a tiny house is too small for a completely self-sufficient power supply.


Heat and space consumption

If tiny houses are not certified according to the Energy Saving Ordinance 2016, the consumption of primary energy in tiny houses can be significantly higher than in old, uninsulated houses. The extremely unfavorable relationship between the volume of the room to be insulated and the envelope surface is particularly relevant here .

The extremely high space consumption of tiny houses is also in contrast to positive climate targets. The space consumption of tiny houses is around 10 times higher than that of multi-storey apartment buildings.

3D printing construction process

When building a house, robots can use concrete to create the shell using a 3D printing process. The rest is built conventionally. So z. For example, a house with a living space of 40 square meters can be completely built in 24 hours at a price of 10,000 euros (→ 3D printing process for house construction ).

literature

  • Sarah Susanka, Kira Obolensky: The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live. Taunton Press, Newtown CT 2008, ISBN 1-60085-047-2 . (English)

Movie

Web links

Commons : Tiny houses  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Alec Wilkinson: Let's Get Small - The Rise of the Tiny-House Movement . In: The New Yorker , July 25, 2011. Retrieved December 18, 2017.
  2. ↑ Carmela Ferraro: Small But Perfectly Formed . In: Financial Times , February 21, 2009. Retrieved December 18, 2017.
  3. ↑ Tiny Houses - Examples from all over the world. Retrieved December 18, 2017 .
  4. ^ Small House Society. Resources For Life, accessed December 18, 2017 .
  5. ↑ That's why Peter Lustig lived in a construction trailer . In: stern.de . February 24, 2016 ( stern.de [accessed on May 13, 2017]).
  6. ↑ Brigitte Bitto: Living on 15 square meters: "No one needs more" In: Lübecker Nachrichten , April 12, 2018. Accessed April 14, 2018.
  7. ^ At MoMA, a Look at Instant Houses, Past, Present and Future - The New York Times. In: nytimes.com. Retrieved March 9, 2020 .
  8. ↑ for example § 43 state building regulations (BauO NRW)
  9. ↑ § 17 - Drinking Water Ordinance (TrinkwV 2001)
  10. ↑ Water Resources Act (WHG)
  11. ↑ NDR, broadcast "How does that work?" for example on EnEv2016-certified Tiny House, January 22nd, 2020
  12. ↑ a b Tiny houses - a positive contribution to climate protection? Retrieved February 18, 2020 .