This museum trip was very educational. Although I don’t have a personal interest in housing, it was very interesting to learn about. The ideas that really stuck out for me were the statistics of single people living alone in NYC and in the USA, the exhibit of a new idea for single person housing and the asAPT NYC.
Although I knew Manhattan was not a place people usually raise children in, I was surprised at the mass amount of single people in New York. If I recall correctly it was 33 percent of New York City residents live alone. Not only was the number shocking, I never thought that in this percentage old people would be included. I always assumed old people wouldn’t want to live in such a hectic environment but the city does have its own attraction that young and old like to live here.
I wasn’t surprised though that Washington D.C. topped the ranking for the city with the most single people. If you think about it, a lot of people there are probably politicians. While their work is here, I believe for safety reasons and the environment that exists in D.C. that families of the politicians are probably living away from the capital. Most politicians most likely only live in single dwellings when they have work there.
The exhibit that showed how much space could be saved with the right thinking really left an impression on me. The space and the furniture were used so efficiently. The couch can turn into a queen size bed; the chair could turn into a ladder; behind the tv was a wine cooler. Not only that, but city regulations were also kept including the width of the doorway to the bathroom. Even though the space isn’t that big, there is so much stuff for a single person to use there. It was just as interesting as the design competition.
The design competition adAPT NYC is a bold step for New York City. The winner of the competition gets their building design built on an actual piece of land. Given the statistics we learned on the museum tour, I see the reason for Bloomberg holding the contest but didn’t know he would go so far with it. Overall, I learned a lot from this trip and was glad to have went on it.
