Today I’d like to bring your attention to this great work by famed Renzo Piano, called Diogene. The man who gave the world the Pompidou Center, The Shad, and the NY Times building (among many other celebrated projects), suddenly decided to think small and built a tiny home. “When I was a student, in the ’60s, I dreamt of making a house 7 feet by 7 feet, as a dream of freedom, of self-moderation,” – Piano told in his recent interview to the NY Times.

Diogene, a prototype house for the furniture company Vitra is very close to those dream dimensions – 8.2 feet wide by 9.8 feet long by 11.5 feet high. Although Diogene’s façade matches that of a simple house, it is in reality a highly complex technical building with consumption, production and disposal satisfying the highest demands of sustainability and energy efficiency. It features two rainwater tanks attached to a boiler, a composting toilet, triple-glazed windows and insulated walls that can withstand temperatures from minus 10° to 105°F. Electricity comes from three rechargeable batteries that plug into an external power source.

Diogene is expected to be produced in three years and will cost about $45,000. A deluxe model with rooftop photovoltaic panels will be about $75,000. The prototype can be seen on Vitra’s campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany.