Plugin House

Around 1.6 billion people around the world lack adequate housing. Plugin House offers a solution. In this bold new manifesto, People’s Architecture Office (PAO) show how low-cost pre-fabricated homes can be used to address homelessness, housing scarcity and gentrification. Their ‘plugin’ structures – assembled quickly and easily with simple tools – can be built by almost anyone, almost anywhere, slotting into small urban lots or providing safe shelters in crumbling ruins. This visual and practical guide, full of colourful assembly manuals and graphic novel-style personal stories, calls on architects and urban planners to consider this revolutionary approach, and provides a template for a possible way out of the housing crisis. This publication was supported in part by a grant from Design Trust.