What's next for Airbnb? The estimated $38 billion dollar company has transformed the home-sharing network forever. Having successfully turned homes, mud huts, even castles into spaces for rent, the global enterprise is searching for new ways to to think about housing. In 2016, Joe Gebbia the CPO and co-founder of Airbnb started Samara. An experimental product development team at Airbnb, the goal was to find ways where new products and services could push the company.
It's been announced thru Samara's website that a new initiative called, "Backyard" will make its debut in 2019. The project is based on investigating how homes can be built to satisfy and respond to the changing needs of owners and occupants. The goal is to find ways to design and prototype new ways of building a home and how these units can it can be shared. According to Gebbia in a recent press statement, Backyard isn’t a house but a way for the digital company to rethink housing. Gebbia and his team are striving to approach this endeavor systematically. Homes are complex, but the bold co-founder is determined to spearhead the project with much optimism.
The new housing prototype is said to be "guided by an ambition to realize more humanistic, future-oriented, and waste-conscious design." Having already successfully tackled the market of making underutilized space - like spare rooms and buildings - accessible and profitable, Gebbia hopes to propel Backyard's initiative in the same light through a construction and architectural approach.
There are still many questions that must be answered. How exactly will this sharable housing model work? Can the production of these homes respond to the ever changing needs of various tenants over time? Will the Backyard initiative be able to respond to the changing world? Gebbia claims the initiative will take a holistic approach. "We can’t approach Backyard solely from the point of view of design, architecture, urbanism, civic ordinance, sustainable materiality or manufacturing. We have to grapple with the whole of it, which makes it one of the most vexing, complex, and interconnected conditions we deal with every day." With prototypes still under wraps, many are eager to see what the company will develop in the coming year.
6 Comments
Hope you like crap! Why not just store your frozen corpse in a Storage facility
I reject the premise that *space* must be profitable. It's actually pretty offensive.
To be fair just "underutilized space" :P
"under-monitized" space
The idea that space can be 'underutilized' rests on the assumption that it must be productive (in the capitalist sense).
$289K for 413 sf?! That is insane.
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