Modulararts: Sculptural Wall Panels

First of all, we’d like to know who said interior walls had to be flat as a pancake? Sure, it’s fine if you want to place a piece of furniture against them (although there’s usually a gap back there anyway because of the baseboard or chairrail). Sure, flat is good if you need to hang framed or canvas artwork on them. And sure, if you want to apply wallpaper to the wall, well, it really does need to be flat.

But let’s say you want to turn the wall into a piece of low-relief sculpture – after all, you’ve got enough painted and papered walls elsewhere in the space or building, and you really, really need some relief. Something to catch the eye by a dramatic play of light and shadow five, ten, twenty feet high, and just as long or longer. Something that would keep the eye moving up and down, left and right, in the way all good design should.

Left: “Uh, honey – I forgot to wear my pants today…” Middle: “I told you we were in a bubble!” Right: “Hey, looks like you lost a little weight there…”

Baby, what you could use is the modular wall surfacing system developed by modularArts, a Seattle-based company that started making this product in 2002. They offer over twenty different designs of modular panels, each thirty-two inches square and cast out of non-toxic mineral material. The panels interlock by means of a proprietary system of steel joints, and the company now offers a low VOC installation kit to further ensure sustainable building practices. Panels are light-weight and applied to sheetrock, so they can be installed by a finish crew using standard tools. The company has recently come out with a smaller scale module for use in residential contexts and for jobs smaller than typical commercial applications.

Being modular, of course, means the panels are flexible in terms of the overall size and configuration of the installation. That the modules are ‘pre-designed’ also brings an economy to the job insofar as it eliminates the need for costly customization while allowing for the creative disposition of the panels within the space.

The designs are on the whole abstract and freshly contemporary in appearance, with a taste of mid-century modern in a few of them. We also rather like that they’re uniformly white, which keeps the eye focused on the effects of light and shadow rather than be distracted by color or secondary patterns.

References:
modularArts