Hasta la Vista Baby: the sun sets on the Hummer as we know it. But is there life after death for a car?
Environmentally friendly doesn’t cross the mind when you think of the 8600 lb, gas guzzling, toxin-inducing fuel machine that is the Hummer SUV. Notoriously known for being the machismo car that is just as much of an expense to a consumer’s wallets as it is to the environment, Hummer’s popularity amongst buyers has steadily declined within the recent years of environmentally conscious purchasing habits. So, when Hummer announced that they were going out of business, it came as little surprise by us. In fact, we’re inwardly pleased that these vehicular extravagances will no longer be chewing up the roads or the world’s supply of fossil fuel.
Home is where the Hummer is, at least when they’re hollowed out, turned face down, welded together, enclosed and roofed. Oh, and furnished.
But, now with the Hummer brand coming to an end, what are alternative uses that the monster-truck has besides being a vehicle? Super-star architect team Chris Hodgetts and HsinMing Fung of HplusF may have come up with the solution: the Hummer Home, a modular, capsule-style residence that’s made out of, you guessed it, deconstructed, recycled, re-purposed and regurgitated Hummers.
Large enough for a family, the Hummer Home features all the amenities and functions of a conventional residence, plus it comes with license plates.
Combining an innovative use of technology with a nod to the Los Angeles car culture, the HPlusF team came up with the idea as a way to celebrate the character of their chosen city with an eco-friendly habitat that even Mother Nature can respect.
Sustainable components are found throughout the home formerly known as a Hummer.
Hummer Home is made of eight body shells that are supported by a prefabricated steel armature, and contains a 12-volt electrical system that charges refrigeration, hvac and media systems. A geothermal storage tank, photo-voltaic cells and soy insulation enhance the home’s energy efficiency.
An open floor plan populated with built-in furniture maximizes the use interior space.
This is apparently not the first time the award-winning architectural design firm HPlusF has taken an existing, ready-made object and transformed it into something new and sustainable. Self-described multi-disciplinarians, the firm’s website states that they comprise “an interdisciplinary group of architects, designers and inventors, with skills in urban design, cultural centers, and exhibit design. Our projects range from museums to historic restorations, from interactives to placemaking, and from the performing arts to temporary structures”.
The Hummer Home need not be used only as a home, says the architects. Re-arrange the eight modules to create community centers, co-ops and studios.
Kudos to HPlusF for turning a bunch of lemons into lemonade. Now, what to do with those space shuttles…?
Magnetic force let these flowers flow freely. Designed by Brandon Perhacs.
Whether we’re buying them for our own decor, or receiving them as gifts, we are among that large population who believe that flowers were put on this earth to give us pleasure. They add refreshing breaths of life and color to our office and homes, letting us put some of the outside world in. We suppose for that, we have Mother Nature to thank, but also, it must be said, our florists, who manage to bring out the formal variety that underlies so much of our appreciation for these beautiful living things. Not only the variety among the flowers within a particular bouquet, but the extraordinary variety of the kinds of flowers that Nature creates around the world.
If bringing out variety is one of the key characteristics of managing Nature in a human environment, then it’s curious how most conventional vases are quite the opposite – static, immobile, unchanging. Obviously, that’s not the kind of product we’d be interested in at MODULE R. Oh, nosirree! What we’ve collected in this category are a group of transformable vases that all allow us to shape them, adapt them, vary them to either change the look of an arrangement or be altered to accommodate different types of flower groupings. It’s co-creation taken to the level of Nature itself.
Adaptation
Set in a wooden base, the Adaptation vase comes with four glass tubes that resemble science class beakers from our high school science days. Simply insert the magnetic steel spheres into the tubes, and the vases connect to the wooden base so that the tubes can tilt, sway, turn or move in any shape or figure, giving your flowers the liberty to move in any direction they please. A kind of human heliotropism, you could call it.
Flowers grow in full bloom with this unconventional take on the vase. Each holder rotates on a threaded bases to point the flowers in a multitude of directions.
Adjustable Twister Vase
Perfect for the playful-minded, the Adjustable Twister Vase looks like a small tree sprouting flowers as they grow. The vase is designed so that the branches twist and rotate, giving any floral arrangement the illusion of a colorful flower tree. The vase’s durable plastic construction and playful shape makes it welcome in kids rooms, family rooms, kitchens, bathrooms and just about any room that has a sense of fun and lightheartedness.
This simple yet versatile vase system features a base with three removable top pieces. Change them as needed to handle whatever type of floral arrangement is at hand – stem, broad or vertical groupings.
FlexVase
Designed by the Dutch team of Arjan van Raadshooven and Anieke Branderhorst, the white porcelain FlexVase consists of a base and three interchangeable top pieces. You switch out the top piece depending on what type of flower arrangement you want to display. Caps are held in place by a strong clip reminiscent of those used in canning jars. It’s three elegant vases for the price of one elegant vase.
Showcase buds with these exceptionally slender vases that dress up the dinner table and have your guests in awe because they won’t topple over even when the subway rattles by. Designed by Shahar P. Studio, Tel Aviv.
Magnetic Vases
Perfect for the dinner table, Magnetic Vases are a series of slender, brushed aluminum stem vases that showcase flowers individually. The vases come with small magnetic plates allowing each holder to connect to one in any arrangement you please. Your dinner guests will be wowed away by their dexterity and ballerina balance when you hide the plates under a placemat, table cloth or runner. Clever!
This collection of elegant vases is designed to be bound together with the elastic bands provided. They work equally well in smaller groupings or individually.
Opaline Glass Modular Vase
The Opaline Glass Vase is a 10-piece vase collection that can be tied together to make one large grouping of vases, or broken up into single or smaller groupings of different sized vases. We think it’s perfect for floral arrangements that come with a variety of stems, plants and flora of varying heights.
The entire collection of vases you see here are on view at the MODULE R store.
Studio Aisslinger in Berlin. Man on left is in detention. Woman on right is watching a company ping pong game. The hex screen in foreground gives us a taste of the eponymous designer’s predilection for modular design.
In our gathering of modular product designs from all the world, it’s hard not to notice that many of them emanate from Italy. Just think Magis, B-Line, Kartell and already you’re talking about a slew of top-flight and enduring interactive pieces. Maybe it’s the climate, the food, the culture – who knows why such a regional concentration exists for this type of design? Still, it would be hard to develop a convincing theory on Italian supremacy without having to explain why, just a few hundred kilometers to the frozen north, the modular meter spikes again as we approach the Berlin studio of Werner Aisslinger.
Aisslinger is a very talented, multi-media and prolific designer who has generated some of the world’s most innovative product, interior and architectural design for brands such as Mercedes Benz, Swiss furniture company Vitra, adidas and Bombay Sapphire (Bombay Sapphire?). He’s got offices in Berlin and Singapore, so we’re talking about a global reach of considerable dimension. That’s good news for aficionados of customizable design.
Aisslinger’s chairs and chaise on display inside the Berlin studio. Below is his Plus Unit for Magis.
The company’s artistic philosophy focuses on making sophisticated new designs from novel materials and technologies, whether modular or not. Fortunately, this is not the stuff of geeky sci-fi fantasies devoid of the human dimension. Rather, the design firm says it wants to change the paradigm of modern product design by looking beyond purely functional capacities to integrate a “dialogue between emotions and technology”. Progressive? We’ve just barely scratched the surface. In an estimated 5 to 10 years the firm has plans to install a small chip inside every product that will generate product information (producer, designer and distributor) and an opportunity for instant purchase when scanned with any type of wireless communication device.
Aisslinger’s deep interest in repetitive, modular design is evident in some of the product displays in his Berlin office. On the left is Mesh, a 2007 concept design for a lightweight semi-opaque screening system (more on Mesh below). On the right is a 2008 modular bookcase made out of, what else, books!
We aren’t the only ones with an interest in this portlfolio: Aisslinger has had his furniture and product design featured at world-class museums such as MoMA (where he has a permanent exhibit on his chair design ), the MET, the French Fonds National d’Art Contemporain in Paris, the Musuem Nue Sammlung in Munich and the Vitra Design Museum in Weil, Germany.
What follows is just a sampling of the modular designs to have come out of his offices over the years.
Coral Seating and Lighting
TOP: Coral seating cushions lay on the beach as if they’ve been washed up from the sea. BOTTOM: Translucent Coral lights using a similar hex unit.
Inspired by the micro organisms emanating from the deep depths of the ocean floor, these modular seating arrangements and lighting fixtures from 2009 are composed of flexible hexagon funnels made from a mix of felt and polycarbonate that create a coral shape when joined in multiples. The sea-inspired pieces come in varying color schemes and, being modular, can be scaled to suit.
NetWork
Embroidered design enters the Age of the New Industrialism.
Perhaps you were under the impression that crocheting was culturally retrogressive. No more. Aisslinger managed to transform this traditional, old-school craft into a progressive, interactive and contemporary design form using high-technology and software. Its 2-dimensional embroidery designs are directly programmed into ‘smart’ machines that stitch the pattern together to make 3-dimensional objects.
Mesh
Your request for privacy should not result in staring at stark white walls!
Gone should be the days of the opaque wall divider or cubicle. For subtle separation with visual appeal, Aisslinger designed a lightweight textile structure evocative of honeycombs. The units interconnect to form customizable interior dividers with the potential to be bent into 3-dimensional shapes – distinctly unlike most separators, which are typically confined to straight planes. Made with three different types of relief structures, the hex motif and ribs were inspired by a blow-up of a vegetable organism. The color contrast of the fibers and directional changes in the weaving pattern add perforation, depth and texture to the dividers.
PLUS Unit for Magis
Stack up or down with the playful storage design unit by Aisslinger.
Similar to UP’s, the PLUS unit is a modular storage system that allows for customizable configuration of shelving units. Traditionally stacked or stacked side-by-side like a staircase, the aluminum drawers add a dimension of fun to functional design. Check them out at our store.
UP’s for RS Barcelona
Here’s how Studio Aisslinger explains the UP’s design:
“UP´s is a totally new modular block-system which integrates the open space between the attached boxes for the scheme: UP´s can generate endless modular sideboard landscapes or shelves always including the “free” space between the box-elements. These box-elements are offered in various types, such as the standard open box, box with sliding doors or boxes with folding wings. All these front-options can be later attached to the basic steel box-element. The visual “architecture” of the UP´s system is a rhythm of closed volumes with airy gaps in between”.
Loft Cube
TOP AND BOTTOM: Get sweeping views of any city with the 360 panoramic views of the Loft Cube. It travels anywhere you go and comes with a handsomely coordinated interior design. Will not fit into an overhead compartment.
Meet the modern day mobile home. This architectural piece is so cutting-edge that it may still belongs in the future. Composed of four walls of either translucent, transparent or opaque material, the structure forms a mobile living cube with 360 degree panoramic views. Custom interior design options are available so that lucky cube-owners can turn the Loft Cube into any type of living or working space, anywhere they would like. Made with the highest quality lightweight materials, the Cube Loft takes only a few days to set-up.
Light Wave
Bombay Sapphire sets the mood blue with their lighting fixture designed by Aisslinger.
Created for Bombay Sapphire, this large-form lighting structure created the ultimate mood lightning for one of the gin brand’s events. Made of 50 x 50 cm modules, the communal lighting object can be arranged in a variety of pixel-like configurations to create larger formats. Each individual module is designed to create a 3-dimensional shape that allows for an infinite number of additional modules. When shaped together, the overall product is an installation of fluid movement among convex and concave shapes (that’s fluid, in case you didn’t see the connection).
And this just in:
Hemp House at DMY Berlin 2011
TOP AND BOTTOM: A structural system made from the cannabis plant. A modular Mary Jane anyone?
Exploring sustainable materials, Aisslinger presented his Hemp House at DMY berlin 2011. The structure is made of more than 70% natural fibers, such as hemp and kenaf, bound together with acrodur, a water-based acrylic resin from german chemical company BASF.
The compression of renewable raw materials forms a new environmentally-friendly composite that is lightweight yet durable. Says Aisslinger, “Design history is driven by new technologies and material innovation. For us designers, the advent of these technologies has always been the starting point for new objects and typologies in design”.
The units that make up Stitch Interlocking Rug system come in vibrant color shades suitable for both young folk and color-inclined grownups.
Finding the perfect sized rug to work in a space can be a challenge, especially when you’re also trying to find just the right color scheme AND find a pattern you like. Sure, your basic white rug is a convenient away to steer around at least the last two problems, but where is the fun in that? White is so…vanilla. Not to mention a bear to keep clean unless you force people at gunpoint to walk around in their socks.
Answer? Make your own rug, of course. Okay, so you don’t know how to operate a loom. Or fleece sheep. Big deal! Modular design comes to the rescue, as it often does. In fact, we’ve got two solutions to offer: the Stitch Interlocking Rug from Lithuanian designer Nauris Kalinauskas, and the Buzzi Puzzle Rug from our friends at BuzziSpace.
The Stitch Rug also comes in grays, blacks and neutrals for a more subdued palette, which can nevertheless be intermixed with strong stronger accent colors for some visual pop.
Stitch works pretty much the way the name suggests: you purchase rug components in 10-piece packages that you then join together to create the finished rug. This allows you to build whatever size floor covering you want and mix colors in whatever proportion you desire. Is your space irregular, open or complex in plan, meaning not a pure rectangle or circle? Egads, this really is your lucky day, because the contours of the Stitch rug modules lend themselves particularly well to making a rug with a non-rectilinear outline.
The Stitch Rug palette embraces a wide range of hues, so you can make sure it goes with your dog. Or child.
Our other customizable floor covering, the Buzzi Puzzle Rug, goes in the opposite direction in terms of shape; in fact, the modules are based on a square, which goes pretty well with the straight walls and rectangular perimeter that characterizes the large majority of interior rooms or areas. The pieces measure about 39 inches across, not including the tabs, which gives them a fun, generous scale. The palette tends toward neutral grays and off-whites. Made from up-cycled PET waste, you’re not only doing your toes a favor when you go this route, you’re helping the environment. And the rug has sound-absorbing properties to boot (get it, to boot?).
The Buzzi Puzzle Rug comes in four colors and is a cinch to put together. Even a grownup could do it.
Don’t know about you, but we’re positively floored by the idea of making cost-effective rugs to suit.
Hanging out: HOMB modular homes offer an unusual faceted design style that derives from the unique shape of their modules.
A few years ago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (aka MoMA) put on a much talked-about show on the state of prefabricated architecture (aka prefab) from the perspective of high design. Looking back on that show now, it’s reasonably safe to say it represented a crest in the wave of popular interest in prefab that emerged with the appointment of Allison Arieff to the editorship of Dwell magazine in 2000. For many years thereafter Arieff used her platform to promote prefab as a viable way to create well-designed, affordable homes and structures using factory-built modules trucked to a site and assembled into a finished whole.
One result of this surge was a proliferation in the number of new companies offering upscale, contemporary-styled prefab dwellings. Today there seem to be dozens if not hundreds of them scattered across the country, vying to catch the attention of the home buying market (or what’s left of it). Some are stand-alone manufacturers, others are collaborative ventures involving architects and fabricators. Collectively their catalog of designs constitute a visible departure from the somewhat stale, ersatz renditions of quasi-traditional homes cooked up by the major players who had dominated the prefab market in the decades since the Second World War.
While it might be relatively easy to tell this new breed of companies apart from their older competitors, it does, at times, get somewhat difficult to differentiate the new guys on the block from each other. That’s one reason why we rather liked what we saw when we first came across HOMB, a modular operation out of…well, we’re not exactly sure. They have one of those websites that assiduously avoids telling you where they are located. Anyway, with the help of Google we found out they were based in Washington State, and appear to be a joint venture of Skylab Architecture and Method Homes.
TOP: From module (left) to modular steel frame (middle) to enclosed house (right). MIDDLE: you’ve seen the stills, now watch the video. BOTTOM: Hellooooo…anybody HOMB?
What really caught our eye in browsing their website was the fact that their modules have a shape rather unlike any we had seen before. They’re equilateral triangles, to be precise, meaning triangles having three equal sides and equal angles.
What’s so exciting about that? Well, you put a half-dozen modules together and what do you get? A hexagon, one of our quintessential modular forms! Think honeycombs! Think architect Frank Lloyd Wright, sculptor/architect/painter Tony Smith, and lots of other less well-known creatives who have seized on this particular polygon as a way to generate and organize form and proportion in their work. Finally, somebody who’s thought out of the typical modular box to connect contemporary prefab with a rich design history. Welcome HOMB indeed!
A chair for children, or a side table for adults: the Child’s Chair by ArchitectMade can grow with you to adulthood and even into your dotage, at which point it’s time to hand it down to the next generation. Image courtesy of ArchitectMade.
Ah, childhood. Frivolous days of frolic and not a single concern in the world. Not even for the awkwardly exponential rate at which we outgrew every pair of shoes, pants and shirt Mom bought for us. Problem for Mom and her wallet, big problem with conventionally static design.
Enter Kristian Vedel (1923-2003), Danish industrial designer and problem solver for fast-growing children worldwide (left).
Vedel was an influential member of the Scandinavian Design movement at its mid-century height, crafting furniture from plastics and woods in a classically modern design vocabulary that embraced ergonomics and pragmatics simultaneously. He incorporated these objective requirements with a personal design vision that sacrificed neither imagination nor practicality.
This balance of perspective made him an ideal designer of children’s furniture, since he resolved the obvious problem of accelerated obsolescence by designing children’s furniture that grew with them instead of them outgrowing it. This made him of one of the first architects to design children’s furniture that wasn’t simply a miniature version of grownup pieces. His Child’s Chair of 1957, currently produced by ArchitectMade, is a superb example of his insightful design philosophy.
A few key aspects of the Child’s Chair explain its success as a piece of children’s design. First, Vedel made the chair reconfigurable by the use of two removable and re-positionable discs that fit into any of four slots in the barrel form. Friction-fit and requiring no hardware, the discs can be handled easily by child and adult alike. That makes the chair more than just a piece of practical furniture – it also makes it an object of interactive play for the child. And once the child’s imagination comes into play, so to speak, the chair becomes potentially infinite in form (in other words, a toy).
LEFT: A sampling of the many configurations of his Child’s Chair from vintage photographs. We especially appreciate the image in the lower right showing a big old guy handing a bottle of beer to an unsuspecting child. Please do not try this yourself at home. Image courtesy of ArchitectMade.
Reconfigurability also enables the chair to serve multiple functions. Simply by altering the discs and orienting the barrel form in any number of directions, the Child’s Chair can function as a table, rocker, highchair, nightstand, storage or display piece. Its versatility is further enhanced by the abstraction of its geometry, particularly the fact that it has no visible base, middle or top. By contrast, imagine taking a traditional child’s highchair and trying to turn it upside down to use it for something than its intended purpose. The only thing you’ll get by doing that is a mess of split peas on your rug.
The absence of details that give a chair its scale – the turnings on a leg, the size of a fixed back, the height of a defined seat – is precisely what enables Vedel to avoid the problem of miniaturization we mentioned at the start of this post.
Reconfigurable, multi-functional, beautifully designed and made: sounds like something they’d carry at our favorite online store for transformable art and design. Oh wait…that’s us!
Bec Brittain’s SHY Light made of LED tubes for Matter are reminiscent of our playful days with K’NEX. The tubes can be detached and re-configured for endless configuration options.
Let’s recall our years of youth, specifically our formative years when team sports was considered the to-do as the after-school norm. Our nine-year old selves gathered around soccer fields and basketball courts as our coaches taught us the basic principals of what makes an organization, of what essentially makes a team. Some of us listened passionately, mentally noting down what was needed to make a great pass, while some, let’s be honest, were prone to daydreaming and annoying our friends. Nevertheless, our coaches tried to imbue us as best they could with the golden rule: there is no “I” in team. To succeed we had to work together in whatever position we were placed or in whatever order we came up to play.
Jason Miller’s Endless Lighting system defies space with limitless arrangements for the wall or hanging configurations.
We now know that our coaches wouldn’t lead us astray. After all, pop culture has proven to us that the most popular musicians, artists and casts would not be successful without the integrity of each part of a successful team. Would the Beatles be the Beatles without their essential four, would Andy Warhol have reached stardom without his entourage at The Factory, and would the crew of Friends be the same if they were missing a friend? Of course, we know that some of these pop culture references have more cultural importance than others, but the point is, without the entire ensemble of these groups as a whole, they wouldn’t be the same. Because one without the other does not make them great, but together as a whole they shine brighter.
TOP: Camp in the great indoors with Paula Sevilla’s Home Camping, a collection of porcelain hanging flashlights. BOTTOM: A naked bulb never looked so good: Frame cluster chandeliers by Iacoli & McAllister come in a variety of colors, frame and light sizes, and configurations.
We were thinking about how this strength in cohesion philosophy relates to modular design when we happened to come across several customizable pendant light fixtures that have recently come on the market. Each of them seem to embody the lesson of team playing in subordinating the part to the whole, thus making the whole greater than the sum of the parts. And of course, as is generally the case with modular and customizable design, the fixtures can be more easily harmonized with the physical parameters of the surrounding space by adjusting their size, color or shape than the static design typical of most fixtures.
Thanks, Coach. You really were the brightest bulb in the bunch.
Modular Screen by Moorhead & Moorhead. Click on image to enlarge. Get it here.
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Opening Lyrics to “At Long Last Love”
Is it an earthquake or simply a shock? Is it the good turtle soup or merely the mock? Is it a cocktail, this feeling of joy? Or is what I feel the real McCoy?
No, it’s just that the world’s first webstore for customizable, reconfigurable, modular art and design has now gone live.
BeadBrick: A Modular Building System by Rizal Muslimin. Ancient building technology in the modern world. (Click on images to enlarge and play slideshow.)
A few recent projects remind us how powerful and cost-effective modular design can be in creating aesthetic effect by means of pattern-making, both in terms of hard costs (physical production) and soft costs (design effort).
Let’s start with a just concluded design competition exploring the innovative use of brick, one of mankind’s oldest modular systems. The very idea of looking for fresh thinking in a building technology now some 7,500 years old is in itself an intriguing concept; not surprisingly, the various solutions offered by the entrants feel both emphatically contemporary and deeply grounded in traditional sensibilities.
That duality is most evident in the programmatic requirement that design solutions be environmentally sustainable. Only in a culture that has lost some of its connection to nature would such a requirement need to be imposed from without. It’s particularly ironic in the context of a re-examination of brick construction which, by its very “nature”, was a “green” building method long before green meant anything but the color of leaves. But we suppose it’s better that we have to re-discover what our ancestors knew thousands of years ago than to disregard it altogether, as had been the case until relatively recently.
Two winning entrants to the 2011 Brickstainable competition embody the new synthesis of past and present. MIT student Rizal Muslimin’s proposal calls for a roughly triangular brick system that can form 2- and 3-dimensional assemblies by variously joining the bricks along vertical and horizontal axes. Bricks are fabricated using both digital and analog fabrication methods, another reflection of the dual character of the project brief. A second team comprising Kelly Winn, Jason Vollen and Ted Ngai of CASE New York was awarded a prize for their Climate Camouflage system. Drawing on recent developments in biomimicry, their submission explores the potential value of applying the age-old art of ceramics to addressing issues of thermal dynamics, self-shading, moisture reduction and other techniques needed to reduce our carbon footprint.
Winning entry to Brickstinable by Jason Vollen and Kelly Winn of CASE (New York). Once again one of nature’s signature modular geometries – the hexagon – is successfully applied to architectural design. Architects are drawn to this pristine geometry like bees to honey!
Beyond their shared ecological investigation, the Muslimin proposal is notable in expanding the traditionally humble, human scale of modular brick to the urban dimension. Unlike the banal repetitive grids of International Style architecture, or the scale-less wrappings applied to many contemporary skyscrapers, however, his imaginative eco-brick generates architecture that appeals to human sensibilities visually as well as empathically, in large part by the repetition of scalar, modular elements.
The newly launched DIY software Repper is as emphatically 2-dimensional as the Brickstainable proposals are 3-dimensional. If the name of their product doesn’t make it obvious, their tagline certainly does: “Everybody Loves Patterns”. They apparently like them so much they’ve developed the software for you (and us) to generate patterns of your (and our) own making that can then be applied to websites, products, interior design components and graphic design. Particularly appealing is that they don’t just leave you hanging with some pretty pictures on your screen, but have set it up so you can take your designs into production by linking up with various manufacturers and production facilities able to turn your visual patterns into a 3-dimensional reality.
We have no idea what this video is about, but it’s on the Repper site so we thought we’d share it with you anyway.
One of the marvelous things about modular pattern-making is that if the originating designer has done the job well, it’s rather difficult for the likes of us (and you) to generate patterns that are, well, downright ugly or mis-conceived. That’s because an aesthetic safety net is, in effect, built into the design unit, whose positive aesthetic qualities are retained when multiplied into a larger assembly. Coupled with the democratizing capabilities of mass customization, the promise of modularity as a tool for broadening the reach of good design continues to be fulfilled.
The ones, the only, the original Tetris tetrads. Click on the images to enlarge and play slideshow.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know about the computer game Tetris. But did you know that it was originally designed and programmed by a Russian scientist named Alexy Pajitnov in the country formerly known as the Soviet Union? Did you know it was released on June 6, 1984? Did you know it derived its name by combining the Greek numerical prefix tetra with the word tennis, Pajitnov’s favorite sport? And did you know that it may be the only computer game to ever inspire a slew of sophisticated design products (okay, the smiley face guy shows up in a lot of merchandise too, but that’s not a game and that certainly ain’t what we call sophisticated!)?
Tetris planters. A design project from the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn.
For us aficionados of modular design, of course, Tetris is a wonderful and even addictive game of recombinant play, a model of interlocking problem solving. Some studies have even shown that repeated episodes of Tetris playing can develop brain facility, although we suspect that many of the people involved in those studies have been subsequently placed in rehab centers for treatment of recurring game-playing syndrome. Anyway, as we’ve been gathering some of these Tetris-inspired design pieces in our Atlantic Avenue gallery, as well as discovering others in our search for great works of customizable design, we thought a quick survey of some of the more eyecatching examples might be worth a read. Here are just a few of them; no doubt, like their progenitor, they’ll be multiplying in fours for years to come.
Top row: Tetris mirror by Julia Dozsa for Fiam. Middle: Tetris couch by Stefano Grasselli. Bottom: if you can’t afford the couch, maybe you can still get a Tetris chair by Gabriel Cañas.
BraveSpace Tetrad Flat Modular Shelving System. A favorite design featured in our Atlantic Avenue gallery.
C’mon baby light my Tetris-inspired fireplace…made by Fontana Forni.
Make no small Tetris-inspired plans: Tetris Architecture. Look out beeelllooooooow!
Climb every LEGO, ford every stream…and you’ll probably find a square somewhere. Bodo blocks by Seletti. (Click on images to view slideshow.)
If there’s one shape that embodies the essence of modular design, it would have to be the cube, and its two-dimensional progenitor, the square. What’s that, you say? You beg to differ? You think the hexagon deserves this coveted designation? Because the hexagon appears in nature in such forms as the honeycomb and snowflake, while a true square is nary to be found among living creatures and organisms? Well, we must admit, your argument does have a certain weight to it, as there is a line of thought that regards Nature as a kind of Supreme Artist by virtue of the boundless creativity evident in the natural world. Take Frank Lloyd Wright, for example: he used the hexagon quite a bit in his architectural designs as a way to connect his work to nature and validate it as a result. One of his disciples, Tony Smith, picked up on this thread and incorporated the shape in his great sculptural portfolio. The list of smart and talented people who’ve used the six-sided shape as a generator of form in their work goes on and on (unlike this post).
The Vitruvian Man by Leonardo after Vitruvius after somebody else long ago.
The square and cube? Well, as we’ve admitted, we’re hard put to find parallel examples of their visible manifestation in the organic world. But we’d be wrong if we thought that they were simply absent. In fact, they’re there, but in a more immanent, below-the-surface kind of way. Perhaps the most famous representation of this notion is the Vitruvian Man as depicted by Leonardo, who based his drawing on a passage from the only text on architecture to have survived from antiquity. In this image we see the human figure embedded in the outline of the square, thus reconciling natural and geometric form. This iconic image positions the square as a modular figure equally rooted in nature as the hex, and therefore ripe for use in the creative arts. Josef Albers, Michael Graves, Sol LeWitt and yes, Tony Smith and Frank Lloyd Wright again, all utilized the square to drive or define their designs.
Top: Eames House Blocks by House Industries. Bottom row left: Twist Lamp. Middle: Rotational Paintings by Studio for A.R.T. and Architecture. Right: BuzziFloor by BuzziSpace.
But here’s why we think the square tops the hex when it comes to modular design: the square is just a lot more artistically friendly than the hex. Its simpler, purer geometry makes it more fluid, flexible and versatile when it comes to combining multiple units. Having only right angles between sides means we’re not forced into accommodating sharply angled or ragged edges at the perimeter, nor are we necessarily dealing with irrational numbers when dimensioning among modular clusters. With its centralized forms and repetitive dimensions the square is a potentially very restful figure, whereas the hexagon seems to defy resolute closure and stasis by virtue of its open faces. And the square generates a perfect three-dimensional volume in the form of a cube, whereas the hex cannot.
Top row left: Cella by Naef. Middle: Modulon by Naef. Right: Modular Candlesticks by Shlomi Schillinger. Second row: Nolastar wallscreen. Third row: Optics Cubes by Kartell. Bottom row, left: WayBasics storage cubes. Middle: BuzziCubes 3D by BuzziSpace. Right: Modular hanging sculpture by Studio for A.R.T. and Architecture.
Not surprisingly then, among the designs and artwork we’ve gathered at our popup gallery the square and cube are the most popular forms to be found. Some of the pieces even define themselves according to their geometric identity by incorporating the terms into their names (Kubes, for example). Examples run the gamut from children’s blocks to artwork, from wall screens to storage bins. The concept behind the Vitruvian Man clearly lives on millennia after it was first articulated. In fact, with so many attractive, contemporary designs deriving their beauty from these singular shapes, perhaps it’s time to stand the world on its head and declare that if you want your work to be hip, be square.
Top: Modular picture frames by GrowFrame. Center row, left: Cuboro marble run. Middle: Kube storage bins by P’kolino. Right: Travel Menorah by Laura Cowen. Bottom: PaperForms wall paneling by MIO.
There has been much talk in recent years about the convergence of the creative disciplines. The divisions that once differentiated art, design, fashion, and even advertising from each other are now said to be dissolving under the influence of the digital revolution and other cultural forces. To be sure, the impact of these changes has not been limited to the arts; the boundaries that once existed among all sorts of categorizations have similarly eroded in the recent past.
Take day and night, for example: traditionally what people routinely did during the so-called waking hours was rather distinct from what they did after dark. Now we can sometimes barely tell the difference between the two as we check our email or do some online shopping in the depth of night. Same with the physical setting of home and office: once upon a time we traveled from the former to the latter before returning home again, with no confusion as to which was which. Now we might occupy one space for both purposes, or use our digital communications devices to keep working even when we’re away from the workplace. Near and far have similarly lost much of their antithetical qualities: the vast distances that used to make us feel separated from people on the other side of the globe now hardly matter at all as we video-conference with them in real time.
So back to the arts. As those of you who’ve followed A.R.T.’s trajectory know, we started our venture with a portfolio of modular art. From there we launched a blog and twitter stream in which we explored modularity and the related topics of mass customization, digital fabrication and co-creativity. In researching material to write about we came to discover that there’s a slew of well-designed modular products out there, but which are currently scattered among many vendors and venues. It occurred to us that what was lacking was a central hub in which to present this rich cache of design work. Thus was born Module R, which aims to fulfill precisely that purpose. And since art and design can now co-exist in a harmonious relationship rather than be segregated into separate venues, we decided to marry Module R (how fast they grow up!) with A.R.T. by opening a popup gallery exhibiting both modular art and design.
The gallery is located at 400 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, and will run through January 9th. There’s a reception on December 2 at 6.30pm, to which you’re all invited (it’s the least we can do for the nice folks who read this blog). For those of you who can’t make it, below is a small sampling of some of the design pieces we have on display at the shop. Either way, we’re looking forward to your feedback, and to the future success of Module R.
Above: Silo House, Cornell University. (Click on image to enlarge and view slide show.)
One of the occasional criticisms of prefabricated modular architecture that we sometimes run into is that it tends towards the boxy. We’re somewhat puzzled by this assessment, since the same can be said of the vast majority of buildings erected since the Greeks began to construct their temples on rectangular plans 2,500 years ago. To be sure, our Platonic ancestors also designed the occasional circular edifice for purposes of pagan worship, but these are invariably regarded as punctuation points in a landscape of otherwise emphatic rectilinearity. Nor have any subsequent efforts to ‘break the box,’ be it by geodesic domes, fractured planes or undulating concrete, succeeded in dislodging the rectangular volume from its preferred status among the world’s structures.
Top row: Left, Silo House interior. Middle and right: Homes for Haiti by Joseph Bellomo. Bottom row: Roll It House by University of Karlsruhe.
For aficionados of modular building, this is actually a good thing, because the very process of erecting a prefab structure lends itself to the use of rectangular units. For starters, just about every modular building component has to be transported to its site on the back of a flatbed truck, which of course means it must rest on a rectangular surface without anything extending into adjacent lanes or striking roadside objects while moving. It’s also a relatively simple form to construct and to attach to other components to form larger compositions. And, as with site-built architecture, it’s a whole lot easier to furnish the interiors than spaces that look to do away with flat walls, geometrically grounded plans or angles of 90 degrees.
Top row and bottom row left and middle: Eco-pods for downtown Boston by Howeler + Yoon Architecture and Squared Design Lab. Middle row right: InflateIt House by Dimitris Gourdoukis and Katerina Tryfonidou. Bottom row: Walking House by studio n55.
But does that keep anyone from designing modular buildings that aren’t rectangular? Of course not – this is, after all, the age of hubris when it comes to defying expectations and perceived limits. We celebrate that spirit with a small collection of modular designs that eschew the rectilinear in favor of, well, in favor of just about anything else. We might not have been able to break the box in over two millennia of conventional building, but at least we don’t stop trying.
Top row: EC*-Cocoon House by Cyril-Emmanuel Issanchou. Bottom row: Modular housing by Guy Dessauges, 1960s.
In a time of informal attitudes towards shaping space, and a continued desire for flexibility in how space can be used, it’s no surprise that there’s been a resurgence of interest in diaphanous wall screens and movable partition systems within the design community. Gone are the days – thankfully – of cubicle dividers covered in burgundy fabric, at least in the milieu of the aesthetically sensitive (you know, like the people who read this blog). So too are beads (along with the aged hippies who liked them), homasote on wood studs (except maybe in architecture schools), bedsheets on ropes (except maybe in some dorm rooms), and shower curtains (shower curtains?).
In their place we now have a veritable flood of tastefully composed products ranging from the most ethereal and permeable membrane to the well-constructed metal and glass assemblies that shimmer under the glare of our low-energy bulbs. We present here a small sampling of some of the more noteworthy pieces in this category we have come across for your viewing pleasure. Many are modular. And, to remind us that there is nothing new under the architectural sun, we start off with some designs by sculptor Erwin Hauer, who was among a group of artists that emerged primarily at Yale in the 1950s and is now known as Modular Constructivists. Hauer, we are happy to remark, is alive and well and continues his work out of a Connecticut studio, including a recent commission for the über-hip Standard Hotel in New York.
We might also let it be known that our interest in this particular object of design was sparked when we decided to create a portfolio of new modular designs executed in fabric and intended to hang on walls. While not meant to serve the pragmatic purposes to which most of the screens featured here aspire, we were obviously intrigued by the way designers have approached the problem of creating very thin and attractive planes out of soft materials and non-structural assemblies.
We hope to have this portfolio ready for its debut later this fall; in the meanwhile, you’ll just have to do with the visual feast we have drawn from the work of others. (If you’re new to this site or haven’t yet discovered this neat trick, you can click on the top image and see a slideshow of all the images at their full size. Captions will include information on the designer and product.)
Not long ago, we were in conversation with a well-known real estate developer about our involvement in a potential project. At one point in the conversation the developer – known for his support of the arts – asked us about our motivations for being involved in the project. “So, do you want to do good? Or do you want to make money?” he quizzed us. To which we quickly replied “We want to make good money.”
The wittiness of our our quip aside, this exchange highlights a long-held perception in popular culture about business, namely, that it is by its own nature in direct conflict with the good. For the many people who have never seen the inside of a boardroom, the world of business would seem attract the worst sort of human characters, starting with the Borgias and ending with Gordon Gecko (leaving the not yet released Wall Street 2 aside). Of course, the reckless greed rampant among today’s bankers that we have all read about in the accounts of the Great Recession only reinforces this caricature.
Perhaps one of the most heartening characteristics of the post-boomer generation of entrepreneurs is its innate disposition towards marrying commerce with social good. Over the years this impulse has evolved from the charming benevolence we used to associate with youthful naiveté and lip service to a very real and very effective way of doing business. Should this trend continue there is a good possibility that the pervasive image of highly successful for-profit ventures being largely run by amoral cads fueled by personal gain will be substantially revised.
The company MIO is but one example of this welcome development. Founded in 2001 in Philadelphia USA by the brothers Salm (Isaac, the numbers guy and Jaime, the design guy, as they succinctly describe themselves), the design products company offers wallpaper, lighting, seating, shelving and storage, tables and accessories. We were initially drawn to Mio because they feature several modular products, including wall screens and wallpapers. But it was in reading the company profile on their website that we were really struck by the new spirit of entrepreneurship that is rising around us.
“MIO was founded,” the brothers Salm write, “with the objective of combining business rigor with environmentally and socially progressive design.” Right there we have a clear renunciation of the perceived dichotomy of doing good and doing well. “All of our products use materials that can be easily recycled with existing infrastructures, fit into closed loop manufacturing systems available today or fit seamlessly with natural ecosystems.” The familiar but nonetheless welcome commitment to sustainable design – only they truly implement it in their products. “We make customers participants in the lifecycle of designs through information and technology.” Optimism in the promise of what our age can offer. And finally, “Since our founding in 2001 we have encouraged our customers to grow into a greener, healthier, happier and more profitable future. Our design focuses on the needs of people today and aims towards the technologically advanced and responsible product experiences of tomorrow.” It’s hard to imagine a more welcome and sincere set of statements of what business can and should do. It seems all we need are the right people in charge.
Oh brother, are you in hot water! Symetrics: the Dornbracht modular bath sysem.
As long-time aficionades of modular design, we might have finally found our Shangri-La, our Holy Land, our Nirvana – and lo, it is a bathroom. Yes, a bathroom, or more precisely, a line of bathroom fixtures and fittings based on a modular grid designed by the German company Dornbracht. Or more precisely still, a design system for planning, constructing and fitting out a bathroom, which the company has dubbed Symetrics.
Among the many intriguing aspects of the Symetrics initiative is that we have a rare occurrence of a manufacturer advancing a series of products linked not just by a few common details or surface characteristics, but by a larger context of formal relationships that guide the placement of the products in their setting. The glue that binds the various products together, of course, is the grid – an underlying vertical and horizontal mesh of 60 millimeter square cells in which can be fit any of the Symetric products.
In a languorous music-backed video on their website (link is below), a narrator tells us that the unifying effect of the Symetrics system concentrates the design focus “on the room as a whole, as opposed to the individual fittings”. Presumably our minds derive greater emotive pleasure when disparate things hold together by means of common measures and orientations than when they are randomly sized and capriciously oriented to each other. At least, that is the position of the rationalist school of design, to which not everyone necessarily subscribes.
At the end of the video Dornbracht’s tagline appears: “The Spirit of Water”, it says. On seeing this we were rather struck by the inherent contrast between the crisp, geometrically pure and eternally fixed square geometries that underlie the Symetrics system and the unpredictably fluid contours of water. At first we thought that the Dornbracht people were vulnerable to charges of being inconsistent in their philosophy and approach (or at least, in their tagline). But then we recalled the iconic image of the Vitruvian man, an ancient Roman icon that embodies the possibilities of reconciling organic nature and abstract geometry, the curvilinear and the rectilinear, the eternal and the ephemeral. So maybe the Dornbracht people have it completely right, in which case we may truly have found Nirvana after all.
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.
Oy vey, does she really want a painting to go with her sofa?!
A documentary film about the abbreviated life of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat was reviewed recently in The Paper (you know, the Paper). Towards the end of the article the writer references a “tantalizing anecdote” where either one of the invited talking heads appearing in the film or Basquiat himself “tells of his [Basquiat’s] disgust at a patron who asked him to color-coordinate a painting to her living room”. This is a real-life version of a frequently repeated mise-en-scène in which the artist becomes aghast at the notion that his or her work could possibly be considered as somehow related to the surrounding décor. A fictionalized dramatization of the same scenario occurs in Woody Allen’s 1986 Hannah and Her Sisters when Dusty Frye (Daniel Stern) visits the studio of the artist Frederick (of Hollywood?) played by Max Von Sydow, who flies into a rage when the moneyed but obviously boorish Dusty explains his desire to find some art of sufficient scale for a place in Southhampton he’s renovating with the help of an interior decorator.
The aversion among the cognoscenti to the idea of connecting fine art to its physical environment is a relatively recent phenomenon. For centuries this was not at all the case; quite the contrary – art was very much viewed as part of a larger whole, rather than as self-contained, autonomous objects floating in their own hermetically sealed bubble. We can start by citing the ancient Greeks, who adorned every square inch on the inside of their pagan temples with works of painting and sculpture, all organized to harmonize with the surrounding architecture. The Romans continued the tradition, developed some new media to add to the mix (e.g., mosaics) and extended it into secular buildings and private dwellings. The practice reasserted itself with a vengeance in the art-crazed Renaissance, its apotheosis being the riotous agglomeration of artistry inside the Christian church, especially those in the northern reaches of Europe.
Things visually calm down a bit in the more restrained Neo-classical era, but in truth it’s during this period that the concept of the consummately designed environment – what would later be broadly labeled the gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work of art’ – emerges as a desired objective among design professionals working at a domestic as well as an institutional scale. Perhaps no entity better represents this new empowerment than the architectural and interior design firm headed by Robert and James Adam. As impresarios of a new attitude towards interior design, the Adam Brothers are among the first to regard the modern domestic interior as a weave of the fine and applied arts, and then to choreograph the execution of these spaces in a masterful assemblage of multiple media down to the smallest detail. To coordinate the parts into a coherent whole, their scope of work necessarily included the design of tableware, decorative accessories, furnishings and floor coverings, as well as the development and commissioning of the fine art program.
You might be thinking at the moment that this is all fine and good for the olden days, but hey, we’re in the 21st century now and we just don’t do that kind of stuff anymore. Well, not so fast: the first generation of Modern Masters were very much of the same mind as the Adam boys when it came to the idea of the totality of the arts. The doctrine of the gesamtkunstwerk underpinned the curriculum of the Bauhaus through its entire history, to take just one of many celebrated examples of modernism’s embrace of this philosophy.
Excuse me, Mr. Molina – I mean Rothko – there’s no smoking in the studio, even your own.
So when and why did artists start to think differently? Honestly, we can’t say for sure, but we can surmise that, like so many things, it all changed with the War (you know, the War) and the demise of the Beaux-Arts. To bolster this assertion we again cite a literary dramatization about artists – this time, the award-winning Broadway play Red. The play tells the story of the painter Mark Rothko in the late ‘fifties after he’s received a commission from noted architect Philip Johnson to paint some murals for the upscale Four Seasons restaurant inside New York’s Seagram’s Building. Rothko is both flattered and repulsed by the invitation, and ultimately decides to turn down the work in part because he felt the atmosphere was undignified and his artwork a mere palliative for the unenlightened fat cats who would be dining alongside them. Among the snippets of dialogue there lingers a whiff of familiar disdain for anyone who dares think of art as merely ‘decoration’ tacked onto a wall.
In historical fact, Rothko was among the last of a generation of artists who very much wanted to embed their art in the larger context of a holistic environment. His canvases for an eponymous chapel in Houston and his research in preparing for the project represent the very embodiment of an artist in search of a physical grounding for his work. So again, we ask, when did things go awry? Okay, here’s another stab: when the artist’s studio and the art gallery became White Cubes.
But that’s a story for another day. For now, we would simply like to note that our efforts to promote a modular art stem in part from our desire to see art and its setting re-united in a common vision. For one of the most appealing characteristics of modular art is its customizability, which provides the artist, collector and designer with a powerful tool for re-linking the components that make up a space. After all, isn’t the whole nearly always greater than the sum of its arts?
We are very fond of these modular storage cubes (and larger cousins), for several reasons. First, their shape – the cube is one of those Platonic solids that the ancient Greek philosophers believed represented the atomic units from which all physical matter derived. We might no longer believe in such theories, but there remains something eternally appealing about this very elemental, cosmically pure geometry. And of course, at the root of the cube is the square, a favored shape for modular design by virtue of its direct application to grids (just glance at some of our own posts, like this one and this one).
The formal simplicity of this product is nicely mirrored in its straightforward construction and means of assembly — no tools, simply a strong eco-friendly adhesive to hold it together (wow, that must be seriously sticky). And just when you think things might be veering toward the formally ascetic, their designers wrap them in colors and finishes that range from child-friendly playful to elegantly adult. The contrasting tone along the edges and back face add to the whimsy of the brighter versions.
Top and middle:Way Basics offers kits for a larger sized unit called the “Tribeca” as well as the standard cube size; both can be customized by varying either their interior sub-division or by grouping multiple units in different combinations. Bottom: buyers can take the possibilities of personalization a step further by mixing and matching individual components from different series as well as by adding their own touches in the form of adhesive decorations, casters, and whatever else they can imagine. The company has also added some neat accessories to its line, including hardware for spinning stacked cubes and tightly fitted storage baskets. Thankfully there are legal or moral limits to what one can do with all these options!
Speaking of eco-, these products are composed of zBoard, which is made from recycled paper and non-toxic materials, and which is available to others for use in their products. Way Basics has received a lot of recognition from green-minded organizations and reviewers for their approach to sustainable design. This doesn’t appear to be just a marketing ploy on the company’s part to bolster sales — they seem genuinely involved in pro bono activities to foster sustainability at large.
Oh, and then there’s the price point; at these numbers who can not like them?
Apparently very few, judging from the strongly positive reviews they’ve gotten on Amazon (not to mention the company’s website, but we’d kind of expect that!). We look forward to seeing some more pieces from this company in the future.
From bricks to blobs: Who said walls had to be straight? Contractors will love this!
The late great architect Louis Kahn once famously asked “what does a brick want to be?”. Probably few of his responders answered back, “a blob”. But then, when Kahn posed his inquiry, future architect Greg Lynn (b. 1964) was probably playing with his Froebel blocks in his parents’ Ohio home and had no idea that he would one day demonstrate the viability of just such an idea.
Flash forward a couple of decades, and Lynn has emerged as a leading proponent of ‘blob architecture’, a term which he helped coin in the mid-1990s. This particular aesthetic is a good example of form following tech, meaning that the artist is letting the available tools guide the creative process, rather than first visualizing a composition and then figuring out how to realize it. In the case of blob architecture, it’s the development of 3D modeling software and the robotic machinery capable of fabricating objects with complex volumes that make this design approach feasible.
Blob architecture is characteristically organic in form, meaning it emulates the soft contours with which nature tends to endow its living creations. It generally avoids the flat surfaces, right angles and clear demarcation of boundaries that we typically associate with works of architecture and the shaping of space by human hands (like rooms enclosed by straight walls). Think of it as the Vitruvian man with the circle but without the square.
Understanding that the whole is dependent on the part, Lynn has explored blob architecture not only as a large-scale undertaking but on the level of the micro-building unit as well. His modular Blobwall brick system — currently marketed by the Panelite company — is a 21st century reinvention of the ancient building block as transformed by the computer. Gone are the measurable dimensions, rectilinear outlines and planar faces that make the traditional brick such an effective building material when stacked and placed in rows. In their place are undulating surfaces, non-linear points of assembly and irregular geometries that require automated fabrication techniques, like rotational molding, to accomplish. Moreover, the blob bricks are completely hollow, and therefore can’t be used to support weight from above, perhaps reflecting the modernist’s ambivalence toward classic brick as a load-bearing material.
Nonetheless, the Blobwall bricks share with their ancient counterparts the capacity to be joined together as modular units to form larger compositions. Robbed of their structural role, assembled Blobwalls hover between sculpture, architecture and design — yet another manifestation of the steady erosion of boundaries that permeates our culture of digital connectivity.
Henry Ford, move over – the era of mass production has come to a close! Personalization is the name of the game now. People want a role in shaping the physical world around them to suit their individual needs, tastes and resources; to satisfy that goal they're looking for works of art and design that are reconfigurable, interactive and scalable. This blog explores how creatives are responding to the quest for customization, as well as the impact customization is having on the creative disciplines themselves.
