Here at Core77 we have a fine tradition of showing you people living in boxes. Specifically, boxes located inside larger units. Perhaps you remember architecture firm Space Flavor's "compact mobile dwelling cube," located inside of a San Francisco loft. It had a separate bedroom and study area "downstairs" and a meditation loft up top.

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Japanese firm MihaDesign took the concept a bit further with their nr1977 dwelling, which made clever use of space to fit three children's beds below and a study/play area up above.

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Ironically, the roomiest boxes we'd come across are these microapartments designed by Italian prisoners.

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The latest box-living fellow to hit the news is Peter Berkowitz, a "bearded, well-mannered San-Francisco-based illustrator" who pays $400 a month to crash in his friend's living room. The problem with crashing in your friend's living room is that it easily transitions into crashing in your enemy's living room, as proximity breeds contempt. Many of you don't know that we Core77 staffers spend weeks at a time living out of the Core77 offices, and sometimes during our nightly pillowfights I feel like folks are hitting a little harder than they ought to. Anyways Berkowitz's solution was to design and build a functional box for him to live out of.

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People are typically surprised that I would want to live in a pod, but I think they tend to underestimate how pleasant a pod can be if it's designed smartly. It's the coziest bedroom I've ever had. It's the only bed I've had with a fold-down desk, a slanted + cushioned backboard, and uniformly ideal light for reading (I can read comfortably from anywhere on my bed. This sounds trivial but isn't).

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Yes, living in a pod is silly. But the silliness is endemic to San Francisco's absurdly high housing prices—the pod is just a solution that works for me. Many people have apartments with the space/ capacity to house another person but choose not to because there isn't an attractive way to do so. Temporary partitions offer poor privacy, especially in terms of sound. They also tend to ruin whatever room they're in—you're less likely to use your living room if it doubles as a bedroom.

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I think pods can provide a needed fix here. Yes the living room housing my pod is smaller—but it's by no means ruined. If pods can provide an attractive way to add a bedroom to an apartment, I think they could help a lot of people out. People with the extra space wanting to bring in more money by subletting, people looking for cheap and simple housing, or people wanting to add another bedroom so their friend can move in could all benefit.

By the way, Berkowitz had some help with the design and construction of his new digs; he credits both Stan Kim Design and Krakatoa Design.

Two questions for you:

1) Do you think the living-in-a-box trend will continue to grow?

2) This is purely hypothetical, but isn't it common sense that when someone knocks your glasses off during a pillowfight, you stop and let them pick their goddamn glasses up instead of nailing me like three or four times in the head with a heavier-than-it-looks goose-down pillow? Freaking savages.