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…?
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”.
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!
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 Architecture Foundation (UK) has launched an international design competition for a modular and portable bike shed at Bankside, south London.
With up to 17 per cent of regular trips to the area made by bicycle, the competition is part of Better Bankside’s EU-funded Smart Green Business strategy which aims to boost local businesses’ eco-performance and promote further cycling in the area.
Open to architects, designers, artists, product designers and other disciplines, entrants are encouraged to produce ‘flexible and innovative yet realisable’ proposals.
A prototype of the winning entry will be built with Better Bankside keen to establish the bike shed in the western end of its zone by March.
Entries will be judged anonymously by a jury featuring Deborah Saunt of DSDHA; Ashok Sinha, chief executive of the London Cycling Campaign; Sarah Ichioka, director of the Architecture Foundation and Jonathan Bell, architecture editor at Wallpaper* magazine.
The deadline for registration and payment is 16 February, 2011 with Architecture Foundation members exempt from the competition’s £30 entry fee.
The final deadline for submissions of ideas is 18 February, 2011.
More:
The modernistic approach to the design of a large number of objects, such as a housing estate, was to design a limited number of types and then to repeat it based on market analysis. This approach led to uniform housing and rigid urban plans. Contemporary processes may overcome such limitations by using rule-based computer-aided design and manufacturing processes. The goal is to give mass-produced houses some of the qualities associated with individually designed ones and to endow planned environments with the qualities associated with traditional settlements. The lecture will first focus on research carried out to develop a rule-based framework for customizing mass housing and then explain how such a framework might be reconfigured to enable flexible urban design. Several case studies will be presented, including systems for existing planned and non-planed designs, such as the one for Siza’s Malagueira houses and the one for the Marrakech Medina, as well as systems for original designs. The last part of the lecture will focus on real-time responsive environments, seen as a particular form of customization.
Organizer:
AIANY Technology Committee
This AIANY event is made possible – and kept free – by the generous support of ABC Imaging.
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.)
FABRICATE is an international peer reviewed conference with supporting publication and exhibition to be held at The Building Centre in London from 15-16 April 2011. Discussing the progressive integration of digital design with manufacturing processes, and its impact on design and making in the 21st century, FABRICATE will bring together pioneers in design and making within architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, materials technology and computation. Discussion on key themes will include: how digital fabrication technologies are enabling new creative and construction opportunities, the difficult gap that exists between digital modeling and its realization, material performance and manipulation, off-site and on-site construction, interdisciplinary education, economic and sustainable contexts.
FABRICATE has emerged as the first in a series of focused events from the highly successful ‘Digital Architecture London’ Conference and ‘Digital Hinterlands’ Exhibition in September 2009. Organised by The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London in collaboration with The Building Centre London, this conference intends to frame discussion around the presentation of built or partially built works by individuals or collaborators in research, practice and industry selected from submissions through our Call for Works.
Representing the broad disciplinary spectrum from design to production, the presentation of built work will contribute alongside leading invited speakers from Australia, Europe, North America, and Asia. A significant and supportive context for the event will be provided by London’s extensive network of global creative consultancies, many no more than a short stroll away from the venue.
We welcome original, innovative and pioneering projects for the Call for Works and we would also encourage works in progress to enter too. Submission requirements emphasize strong and informative visual material with succinct analytical text and project synopsis. Selected conference submissions together with articles from keynote speakers will be featured in ‘FABRICATE: Making Digital Architecture’ published by Riverside Architectural Press and launched at the conference.
Central to the aim of FABRICATE is to interrogate and disseminate difference, similarity and innovation across design and making practices in industry and academia. Submissions will be independently blind reviewed by two members of an international panel of experts. Selected submissions will be featured in ‘FABRICATE: Making Digital Architecture’ published by Riverside Architectural Press.
The Call for Work deadline is the 20th of September 2010.
Submission Instructions
On our submission page, you will need to read and agree to our terms and conditions and provide the following information.
Author(s) Details
Fill in details of the author(s) and collaborators if any.
Project Title
The project title as you wish it to be published, followed by the site location if applicable and finally the year.
Keywords
Provide between three and seven keywords that help us choose appropriate reviewers from our panel of experts.
Synopsis (Between 500 and 1500 words)
Please pay particular attention to to this part of your submission. Synopsis should both introduce the project and focus on any specific innovations in the design and fabrication of your work. We are also interested in the development of the project including challenges and lessons learnt, conclusions on the approach you took, and where your practice goes next from this project. Furthermore, we ask you to add a paragraph at the end of your text where you can include any further details about your project that you feel are important e.g. you may wish to acknowledge sponsors, clients, contractors, universities etc.
Images (Between 5 and 15)
It is recommended that submissions include an appropriate range of images including concept sketches, early iterations, CAD and physical models, photography, manufacturing or construction information, scripting, test pieces, prototypes, parallel experiments, final assemblies, artifacts in use, revisions, renovations, and subsequent iterations. PLEASE NOTE images MUST be submitted as a single combined PDF not exceeding 30Mb in size. All images must be fully captioned, credited and dated in the PDF. The PDF with your images is the only part of your submission in the form of attachment. Everything else should be filled in in the appropriate fields of the online submission form.
The submission process is only online, no postal submissions will be accepted.
Multiple submissions are permissible.
Please note that this is a complete article submission. No pre-submission of abstracts is required. Ready to submit? Click here.
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.
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?
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.
The Twin Groves Wind Farm Lookout is a publicly accessible landscape installation in central Illinois. It serves as an information center and viewing platform for the Horizon Wind Energy company to teach the public about renewable energy. Metalab digitally modeled the design as a kit-of-parts to be made in Houston and then delivered to remotely located sites in modified shipping containers.
For about the last 150 years there’s been a notable divergence among visual artists in terms of how the works of art got made. Painters and sculptors have typically created their pieces themselves, while architects designed structures and spaces but then turned over the job of constructing them to builders and craftsmen.
That’s all likely to change now, and in fact has been for some time. As the use of digital fabrication technology continues to spread among visual artists, we’ll likely see more and more of them adopting the architectural method of separating the conception of the work from its fabrication by utilizing automated machinery to produce their work. Meanwhile, architects are taking down the historical wall between design and construction by exploiting the same technologies to conceive and then manufacture building components for their projects.
In combining expertise in architecture, design, construction and digital fabrication technology, the Texas-based firm Metalab is a clear example of this new trend toward consolidating the creative processes in the architectural field. Principals Joe Meppelink and Andrew Vrana bring to the table experience in each of these disciplines both as practical undertakings and, more recently, as academic subjects in courses they teach at the University of Houston.
Top left and middle: Ceiling Cloud, a suspended acoustic and lighting ceiling system. Top right: Mirabeau B Sales Center, a temporary structure constructed from recycled shipping containers and digitally fabricated components. Bottom left and middle: New Harmony Grotto at the Univ. of Houston. A reimagination of Frederick J. Kiesler’s Cave for the New Being, in digitally fabricated steel. Bottom right: Press+Pleat+Peel, a digitally fabricated panel system for architectural applications.
Metalab’s portfolio reflects this diversity, comprising work in architecture, product design, digital fabrication and, interestingly, civic art. For this last category the firm has teamed with individual artists to realize projects requiring a working knowledge of digital fabrication. “Open Channel Flow”, a work of public sculpture commissioned by the City of Houston Art Collection from New York-based artist Matthew Geller, provided the occasion for Metalab to contribute turn-key services, including architectural design, custom component fabrication and construction management.
On a similar scale, the firm collaborates with ttweak renewables, a marketing, design and communications firm specializing in renewable energy development and other sustainable technologies. The two offices work together to design and fabricate lookouts, kiosks and visitors’ centers for educating the public about renewable energy within a public landscape context.
Metalab is also affiliated with Tex-fab, an organization which presents itself as “a resource for designers, academics, fabricators, and students seeking out the innovative application of digital technology to the physical environment”. Its programs include workshops, lectures, exhibitions and competitions – the first of which is is now underway (check out our earlier post). The group’s network is largely composed of Texas-based companies, institutions and individuals, but it’s looking outward for opportunities to collaborate with similar entities in metropolitan centers across the U.S. and internationally as well.
Metalab’s diverse menu of services and array of professional associations grow from a culture of collaboration fostered in part by the ability of the Internet to connect us. Maybe it’s all a dream, but thanks to the computer, we may all wake up one day to discover that cooperation has finally supplanted competition as the true catalyst for human advancement.
On behalf of The Emerging New York Architects Committee, Versa Design, Lero Lero Productions and Archinect.com, we would like to invite you to the premiere event Shifting Paradigms: Design in Transition.
This event will explore the evolving relationship between the creators of the built environment and the technological advancements in the design and fabrication process that are facilitating a new contemporary language of architecture.
Shifting Paradigms will feature the premiere of (Re)centering the Square, a documentary film which provides in-depth analysis of the recently completed 41 Cooper Square in New York City. Designed by Morphosis Architects, this academic laboratory exists as a pure child of the digital age, providing a comprehensive model of how digital technology and a growing concern for environmental sustainability have impacted the design disciplines over the last decade. Framed around an engaging discussion with the Project Manager, Jean Oei of Morphosis Architects and Dr. George Campbell, President of the Cooper Union, (Re)centering the Square features a compelling visual tour of the facility, a detailed narrative from multiple perspectives explaining the forces which drove the design process forward and captures the transformation of the architectural profession over the last ten years through the lens of this visionary project.
Following the film, a panel of leading practitioners and researchers will examine how contemporary advancements in digital technology and environmental sustainability are propelling our most innovative design experiments, facilitating a new architectural discourse, redefining the relationship between designers and machines and helping to shape how humans will interact with the built environment in future generations.
Tuesday June 22nd at the Center for Architecture
FREE ADMISSION + WINE & H’OURDERVES
6:00pm Wine & H’ourderves
6:35pm Film Premiere
7:15pm Panel Discussion
Panelists Include:
Marty Doscher: Morphosis Architects
Paul Seletsky: ArcSphere
David Benjamin: The Living New York / Columbia University GSAPP
Neil Meredith: Front / Columbia University GSAPP
David Pysh: Gehry Technologies
Moderated by Jason Ivaliotis: Versa Design
(Re)Centering the Square
Director: Elba Calado
Executive Producer: Jason Ivaliotis
A competition was recently held to design a temporary pavilion for Governors Island, a historic former military encampment and Coast Guard base in New York Harbor. The brief called for the design of a shelter and gathering place for people participating in planned and impromptu events during the summer season. Entrants were instructed to design the installation as an efficient structure and as a model of sustainable construction. The competition was jointly sponsored by FIGMENT and The Emerging New York Architects Committee of the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter (ENYA) and the Structural Engineers Association of New York (SEAoNY).
Ann Ha and Behrang Behin were selected as the winning team for their design Living Pavilion. The vaulted structure employs reclaimed milk crates as a modular framework for holding plant materials to serve as infill material (we hope it grows fast). The design recalls the graceful vaults built in America at the turn of the last century using the Guastavino tile arch system. Unlike the Guastavino works, however, this structure will be disassembled in October 2010 and its crates given away for re-use.
We rather like the integration of nature and structure in the interweaving of organic and inorganic matter, as well as the contrast of the qualities of soft and hard, organic and industrial, variegated and uniform.
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.
