This article was taken from the April 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
If your idea of a holiday is cocooned isolation, Austrian architects WG3 have invented just the thing: the Hypercubus, a mobile, self-sufficient hotel room for two. The 25 metre squared unit can be flat-packed and transported anywhere, to be angled and screwed down to a concrete pad. "Private owners might want it as an extra apartment in the garden, or a little weekend home by the sea or in the mountains," says designer Matthias Gumhalter. "We are also speaking to hotels in Austria and Switzerland who want to buy clusters of Hypercubus to set them up during tourist season."
Named after the mathematical "hypercube", it is made of wood and glass and designed to have three levels: a kitchen area with a small stove at ground level, a living room on the next level and, jutting out of the ceiling, a sleeping platform for two. "We are also designing a shower/toilet to add to the kitchen area," says Gumhalter, 32.
Designed in 2010 while Gumhalter and his partner Christian Reschreiter studied at the Graz University of Technology in Austria, the Hypercubus was an experiment. "We decided to build it as a transportable hotel room, because the tourism industry has varying demands in the summer and winter," explains Gumhalter. "So it can be set up or taken down, and be a new space in places where there is no other accommodation, such as remote national parks."
Currently, the WG3 team is making the prototype lighter: "It weighed seven tonnes when we first built it, but we have brought it down to four tonnes," says Gumhalter. The team aims to start large-scale production in the spring, and sell the unit for about $60,000 (£37,400). "Before we started WG3, all four of us were carpenters," says Gumhalter, of WG3's founders. "So on the one hand we make architecture, but it also has to address a practical problem."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
