The Anglosphere's 2,000 sq ft detached home is a 75-year historical anomaly. Most of the world has lived in 200–400 sq ft for decades — Tokyo, Hong Kong, much of Europe, urban Latin America. Toronto's affordability crisis is forcing North Americans to confront what the rest of the world has always known. T1NY is the studio's continuous research practice for the global tiny / micro / modular / conversion dwelling network and what it teaches.
Drive through North American suburbs and you'll find a remarkably consistent dwelling type: a detached single-family home, 1,800–2,500 sq ft, on a 5,000 sq ft lot, built between 1950 and 2010, designed for a nuclear family of four. This is not the norm of human dwelling. It is a 75-year experiment in a specific geographic region, made possible by cheap land, cheap energy, cheap cars, and policy that subsidized them all.
The rest of the world has lived differently. Tokyo households average around 700 sq ft. Hong Kong: 500. Berlin: 750. Paris: 650. São Paulo: 800. Smaller dwellings are not a deprivation in these places — they're the design constraint that shapes the urban form, the social life, the food culture, and the daily logistics. The neighborhood does the work the suburban lot used to do.
T1NY studies this global small-dwelling network and what North America (which is now being forced into smaller dwellings by affordability) can learn from places that have always lived this way. The studio's BXBX build practice is one specific synthesis of this learning; T1NY is the research that contextualizes it.
T1NY's founding statement of practice. ~12–18,000 words, published as a beautifully-typeset web essay and downloadable PDF. The essay establishes T1NY's thesis at full depth: the Anglosphere anomaly, the global small-dwelling network as it actually operates, the technologies and design moves that make small dwellings work, the affordability crisis as the forcing function, and what BXBX (the studio's build counterpart) offers as a specific synthesis.
Currently in genesis collection phase. The inventory of inspirations, places visited, books read, technologies encountered, and personal moments that anchor the essay is being filled in over weeks. The essay drafts begin once the collection has enough material — likely autumn 2026.
The genesis collection itself is public — read the inventory structure and the prompts being answered as the work proceeds.
BXBX — T1NY's build counterpart. T1NY produces editorial research; BXBX produces the studio's actual dwelling products. The Hako (BXBX-005) is the studio's specific synthesis of the small-dwelling thesis T1NY articulates.
MHYC — T1NY's research sibling at the next scale up. T1NY asks how the dwelling itself works; MHYC asks where the dwelling sits in the global network of culturally-coherent neighborhoods. Sister research practices.