If you are going to live on Mars, nothing like a stylish house with everything compressed in less than six square meters.

Many people are concerned about the «new» real estate bubble, which has developed in the main Spanish cities led by Madrid and Barcelona (of course) and in which prices per square meter have risen considerably, taking into account that the The most expensive houses are the smallest (logical question) since we buy units and the price/m² ratio always decreases with increasing denominator.

All in all, it is time to look to other latitudes to see how to deal with the high mass of cities. A must-see is Beijing, the capital of China, where we have found the smallest home ever designed, measuring 5.76 square meters. Of course, it has a cheat because it has been designed to live on Mars, which makes it even bolder because, for now, we have no trace of Mars being heavily populated…

Where do we find this wonder? We have found this house in a very special framework called ‘‘House Vision’, created by the Japanese artist and designer, Kenya Hara, to promote urban and social analysis through innovative projects. Use the house to reflect on the future of our lifestyle (yes, I also think it is very elaborate), like the ten that make up this year’s edition and from which we extract the most striking of all, the Martian house.

‘Mars Case’ is the name of the prototype they have designed at Open Architecture for this year’s exhibition, imagining a scenario in which humanity fled from the mother planet to the red neighbor. «Two hundred years ago, Henry David Thoreau retired from society and moved to Walden to reflect on the nature of simple life,» they say from the study that «today, in an era of environmental crisis and seemingly endless consumption of material We must ask ourselves: What are our essential needs?”.

So, as they tell us about the real estate bubble, designers expose us to a future in which excessive consumption has pushed us to the limit. We must leave Earth with what we have, with the essential, using our technological means reuse and recycling as a way of life. «As we find a new appreciation for every drop of water, every bite of food, and every breath of air, will we finally discover the freedom of a truly simple life?» They reflect, «is this what we should define as ideal house of the future?”. What a way to embitter the day, huh?

Placed in this terrible and apocalyptic scenario, it is clear that the human being would «pull» his most versatile and effective tool: the imagination. The construction of the prefabricated house ‘Mars Case’, designed as a zero energy consumption enclosure, with zero waste, guarantees the survival of humanity in a cabin of dimensions 2.4 x 2.4 x 2 meters, occupying a volume of 11.52 cubic meters, as if it were a van, to understand us better.

This new house, fully industrializable, would contain everything necessary for the normal use of a house. Most of the elements would not be in sight, they would be inflatable or deployable, occupying a tiny place inside the tiny cabin. As designers boast, everything can be created today. With all the electrical appliances interconnected wirelessly, being able to control each element from a smartphone.

The house achieves an integrated ecosystem by recycling the heat, exhaust gases, condensation and other by-products generated by each electronic device, returning energy, air and water, and minimizing the consumption of resources. However, I suspect that this design does not respond so much to the need to take advantage of resources in a place called Mars, but to that of experimenting with designs where space is the minimum possible, in anticipation of a high increase in population? Or as an excuse to create spaces with zero energy consumption?

What this prototype has shown is that houses of less than 6 square meters can be built, the minimum that most regulations in our country allow for a single bedroom. The ‘House Vision’ exhibition is at the entrance to the popular Chinese stadium ‘The Bird’s Nest’, a spectacular work in which there is plenty of space. But outside ironies, you can visit it until November 4, 2018. So if you are close or you can organize to visit it, it is totally recommended.