Rail pod regeneration

I always get frustrated with city regeneration projects in the UK - when will town planners realise that shopping centres are not the only way to revitalise a town, and actually don't really regenerate them at all? And don't even start me on the Olympics and how that money could be better spent for East London... However on a more cheerful note here is a fantastic idea that recently won third prize in a competition to regenerate the Norwegian (gotta love that country) town of Andalsnes. It was proposed by the Swedish architects Jagnafalt Milton (who these images are courtesy of). Andalsnes is a city with a lot of disused rail infrastructure and the proposal utilised these rails to make portable modules that could be moved around as was convenient.

I love the idea of having a miniature pod house that you can move to a better location depending on season etc. They remind me of the sort of places you would imagine living in as a child when playing survival games of where you would build if all the adults disappeared. I would hide in my greenhouse at the bottom of the garden in storms and imagine that this was my home from now on. There's something about this design that reminds me of that childhood magic of the aftermath of a gentle apocalypse. They also remind me of the tradition of making houses out of railway carriages - something that was definitely common in the past down here in Cornwall. When doing research for a community project recently I was thrilled to find out about this way of life where the carriage homes were seen as the step between homelessness and a 'normal' house. They were really beautiful and I desperately want one as a study... I would like a Norwegian railway pod house too, though sadly the design did not win so they will not for now be built. At least they'll be in the great company of all the utopian housing schemes that nearly were, and thanks to modern technology, these days we have photos so in some kind of dimension they do exist...