"Walked up the hill too soon." This was the terse rebuke from a Fianna Fáil official after the Sunday Independent revealed last month that homeowners were in line to earn up to €14,000 tax-free by renting out newly built modular units in their back gardens.
Threshold, Age Action and the Irish Council for International Students (ICOS) warn the proposal could negatively affect students and older people who may be pressured by family members seeking to benefit from their property.
In 1962, the architect Buckminster Fuller envisioned a floating city that would free humanity from its dependence on the Earth. The speculative project consisted of enormous geodesic spheres that would naturally levitate in air warmed by the sun and be anchored to mountaintops.
The Off-Grid Luxury Mobile Double Office is a trailer-based unit that packs two fully independent workspaces and a sleeping area into a 26-ft (7.9-m) frame, all while running entirely on solar power. Built on a double-axle trailer, the unit spans 10 ft (3 m) wide, broader than a standard tow, which means it requires a permit for road transport.
"We need to reduce emissions from the building sector by 80-90%, and build almost 2 billion new homes by the end of the century," warns Kuittinen. These imperatives... are incompatible, which is why we need to consider radically different housing and construction solutions.