Stacking chairs have long been a space-saving staple of offices, homes and schools, but getting a complex shape like a desk to stack up is a challenge — one these designers decided to take on for a very specific and practical application.

Studio Nos redesigned the traditional children’s school desk to make it affordable, durable, lightweight and able to be put away when not in use. The result of their efforts is a brightly colorful and interconnected chair-and-desk system with a number of nifty features.

The conical chairs stack for storage while a backrest allows students to hang their bags and backpacks. A slot underneath, meanwhile, provides a place to store books and other school supplies.

The top addition can be taken off, too, not just to store but also to make space and change up seating configurations. All in all, the seat-and-top set gets the job done and looks good while doing it, then comes apart as needed.

Addressing the combined challenges of mobility and density, this series of design solutions (both conceptual and actual) turn trailer living into a vertical endeavor. While the image above was alas only a stage set for a theatrical production, there are real-world examples of this approach dating back decades.

Industrialist, developer and mobile housing pioneer Elmer Frey pitched an incredible project in the early 1960s: a set of spiraling skyscrapers designed to house roadworthy mobile homes. The 20-story structures would house over 500 homes each with parking below and restaurants and community spaces above. While this grand vision never came to pass, Frey did not give up so easily.

Instead, he approach the problem at a smaller scale, hoping to win support for his bigger ambitions. Built near the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in Minnesota, the SkyRise Terrace was controversial from the time it was constructed.

The site provided frameworks for stacking conventional mobile homes, arrayed in an arc around a central shared space. Problems with plumbing and fear of tornados contributed to the deconstruction of this complex a few years after its creation.

In nearby Mankato, the Valley View Apartments complex used similar design principles to create an equally-unappealing set of stacked mobile homes framed by concrete supports. Deemed ugly by critics locally and around the country, this complex also was eventually demolished, but was still not the end of trailer-stacking history.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Social Climbers 7 Vertical Trailer Parks For Mobile Urbanites

An urban pedestrian paradise, this conceptual design proposes to turn cities skyward with a system of flexible open spaces that gradually rise as floor plates curve up around its core.

This winning  entry to the SkyScrapers & SuperSkyscraper Competition by SURE Architecture, dubbed Endless City, is more than just visually compelling – it also creates an argument about urban pathways and civic connectivity.

Its design boasts a series of sustainable strategies deployed throughout the structure, including passive energy, heating, cooling and lighting systems as well as advanced waste and water management.

The structure is framed around a series of vertical steel-tress columns that in turn support a pair of ramps connected periodically by bridges.

The program features a mix of commercial, residential and institutional functions, with larger community areas mixed periodically throughout.

The core concept, though, is to commingle these programmatic elements with circulation, allowing visitors and occupants to mix on its various levels and traverse the structure vertically – skyways taken to a new extreme. Its modular construction also theoretically enables further additions, allowing it to grow upward with time.

An elegant concept and beautifully executed, this thesis project strips away everything but the essentials from the process of printing, proposing a simple solution to reduce visual clutter in your office.

Dubbed Stack, an aptly short title for such a minimal machine, the design represents a thesis solution by Mugi Yamamoto. Aside from its small size and refreshingly spare appearance, its approach also circumvents a classic shortfall of typical printers: the size of the paper tray.

Instead of reloading frequently, you simply set Stack on top of a pile of blank sheets of paper and let it work its own way down, itself a lovely process that also lets you know how far you are through the printing job at hand.

A few points of concern, though, from a practical standpoint: it is hard to say how well the printer would remain stable as it progresses, or whether shifts in weight along the way would cause jams. It is also not entirely clear whether power cords would pose an problem, or how high the finished paper stack could go before potentially spilling off the sides. Still, as a concept, it is lovely, and at least some of these issues could be corrected by introducing elements like guides that flip down to keep the stack aligned below, or higher supports above to stabilize finished sheets.