Dezeen Magazine

Kanye West's prefabricated affordable Yeezy Home units take inspiration from the Star Wars films and might be used as underground homeless housing.
An abandoned Tatooine planet set from a Star Wars movie shot in Tunisia

Kanye West is building Star Wars-themed housing for the homeless

Kanye West's prefabricated affordable Yeezy Home units take inspiration from the Star Wars films and might be used as underground homeless housing.

The celebrity musician revealed the prototypes for his first foray into architecture as part of a cover interview with Forbes.

West said he had taken aesthetic cues from the houses designed for the desert planet of Tatooine, the home of Luke and Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars series.

Kanye West's prefabricated affordable Yeezy Home units take inspiration from the Star Wars films and might be used as underground homeless housing.
Yeezy Home is reported to look like something from the set of Star Wars. Photo by Chott el Djerid

There have been no photos released of the structures yet, but Forbes reported that the three prototypes are "oblong and dozens of feet tall".

These prefabricated units, West suggested, could be sunk into the ground with a lightwell carved into the top and used as housing for the homeless.

Shot on location in the Tunisian desert, Tatooine's set design featured earthen houses with domed cupolas. The sunken homes are similar to the housing complexes of the Berbers of Matmata, Tunisia, who sink their homes in pits to keep them cool and cave-like.

Kanye West's prefabricated affordable Yeezy Home units take inspiration from the Star Wars films and might be used as underground homeless housing.
The housing design for Tatooine took inspiration from local Tunisian architecture. Photo by Bel Adone

West announced Yeezy Home in 2018 via Twitter, where he put out a call for architects and industrial designers to join him on the project and "make the world better".

The units will be prefabricated to keep costs down and be used as low-income housing or, as West suggested, as accommodation for homeless people.

Fashion designer Jalil Peraza, who has worked with West before, revealed renders of the Yeezy Home project on Instagram soon after it was announced, but the posts have since been deleted.

The Forbes interview with West also revealed information about his Los Angeles mansion, which has alabaster walls and Belgian plaster flooring that requires specialists to be flown in from Europe to repair any scuffs.

West, who started his career as a rapper, has been vocal about his passion for architecture over the years.

In a radio interview in 2013 he said he was working with architects to learn more about the process, and during a visit to Harvard University that year he told students that the world could be saved through design.

Main image is by Jerzystrzelecki via Wikimedia commons.