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August 7th, 2011
Black and Blum’s inscribable Time Square clock and magnet board. Multi-tasking expands its reach to more and more products.
In the age of multi-tasking, it’s about time more of our domestic appliances caught up to our multivalent work methods. Sure, we’ve got fancy electronics that quadruple up as our mp3 players, telephones, internet browser and reading tablet, but a number of our long-standing devices at home have been slow in catching up to contemporary realities. Stuck and stoic with the progression of time, these laggards often serve the same function they’ve had nearly since their inception.
Speaking of time, wall clocks may well have placed been in this category except for a couple of recent additions to the genre. Black and Blum’s Time Square clock actually triples its purpose by serving as a timepiece, blackboard and magnet board all in one. Combining these particular functions in one device is not without reason, since the need to reinforce memory by quick notation is inextricably linked to keeping track of time. (Being New Yorkers and recreational punsters ourselves, we also appreciate the witty name, especially as it comes from a London-based design firm.)
Alessi’s Blank Wall Clock: no need to draw a blank anymore when there’s something you’re trying to remember to do.
Alessi’s Blank Wall Clock is the formal yin to Black and Blum’s yang, being white and circular as compared to black and square. It doesn’t have the magnet function of Time Square, but its whiteboard writing surface has a nice clean look and allows for the use of dry markers in place of chalk.
Looks like our appliances are finally catching up to our busy selves after all. It’s about time.
July 17th, 2011
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.
June 22nd, 2011
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.
June 12th, 2011
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!
May 22nd, 2011
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.
April 24th, 2011
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.
www.module-r.com
Lyrics by Cole Porter. Sung by Frank Sinatra. And others.
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February 6th, 2011
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!
November 27th, 2010
Morpheo Modular Candlesticks by Seletti. Click on images to enlarge and play slideshow.
With the approach of Hanukah and Christmas, we’re naturally inspired to assemble this collection of modular candlesticks and menorahs, several of which we’re displaying at our popup shop on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. For even in the age of pixels, LED’s and CFL’s (compact fluorescent lights, for those who haven’t had the displeasure of using them yet), there remains something enduringly and sensuously human about the simple flickering flame at the end of a candlestick. And of course, the association of fire not only with our antediluvian forebears but with the gods themselves carry us to a time and place not of this world. Plus you can roast marshmallows with them.
  
Top row left: Morpheo Modular Candlestick in clear. Middle: Modular Candlesticks by Museum of Robots. Right and below: Modular Wood Candlabra by WUDA.
As with all things modular, these designs beckon the user to participate in form-making by determining how the pieces are to be arrayed. In the case of our secular candlesticks, such as the Museum of Robots and Seletti designs, this typically means choosing in what order the components are to be vertically stacked on their stem. The elaboration of silhouette and the rhythmic sequence of superimposed three-dimensional shapes constitute the principal design challenges in their case. Still, if the modular system has been designed well, it’s hard to come up with something truly ugly, and the necessity of skewering the pieces on a fixed vertical centering pin means people have little room to completely lose their formalistic minds.
  
Top: Slide Magnet Menorah by Laura Cowen. Bottom left: Concrete Menorah by Marit Meisler. Middle and right: Modular Menorah in aluminum and brass by Ian Milne.
By contrast, the menorahs are oriented horizontally so as to accommodate the multiple candles required by the eight day holiday. Unlike the secular candlesticks, however, once the connecting pieces that normally hold the individual candleholders are done away with, there are few constrictions as to where the candles can be placed in relationship to each other. It is interesting to observe that most people, when bequeathed the gift of almost total design freedom, nonetheless still compose the individual pieces of the menorah in some kind of geometric arrangement (have a look at the product illustrations in this post, for example). Perhaps it is our innate desire for order, or our respect for the decorum of a religious object, but we’re just not ready to treat the emblem of Hanukah like the inside of our closets. And for that, we can be truly thankful.
  
Top row left: Hex Enamel Modular Menorah by Jonathan Adler. Middle: Cube Menorah by Shlomi Shillinger. Right: Shapes Menorah. Bottom: Travel Menorah by Laura Cowen.
September 21st, 2010
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.)
  
  
References
Erwin Hauer
Piasa
Egawa + Zbryk
Inmod
Mia Cullin
Moorhead & Moorhead
MOVISI
Deesawat
LOFTWall
Act
Lammhults
molo
3form
MIO
Kvadrat
August 24th, 2010
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.
References:
Dornbracht Symetrics Bathroom Fixtures, Fittings and Planning System
Dornbracht Symetrics Video
August 9th, 2010
First of all, we’d like to know who said interior walls had to be flat as a pancake? Sure, it’s fine if you want to place a piece of furniture against them (although there’s usually a gap back there anyway because of the baseboard or chairrail). Sure, flat is good if you need to hang framed or canvas artwork on them. And sure, if you want to apply wallpaper to the wall, well, it really does need to be flat.
But let’s say you want to turn the wall into a piece of low-relief sculpture – after all, you’ve got enough painted and papered walls elsewhere in the space or building, and you really, really need some relief. Something to catch the eye by a dramatic play of light and shadow five, ten, twenty feet high, and just as long or longer. Something that would keep the eye moving up and down, left and right, in the way all good design should.
  
Left: “Uh, honey – I forgot to wear my pants today…” Middle: “I told you we were in a bubble!” Right: “Hey, looks like you lost a little weight there…”
Baby, what you could use is the modular wall surfacing system developed by modularArts, a Seattle-based company that started making this product in 2002. They offer over twenty different designs of modular panels, each thirty-two inches square and cast out of non-toxic mineral material. The panels interlock by means of a proprietary system of steel joints, and the company now offers a low VOC installation kit to further ensure sustainable building practices. Panels are light-weight and applied to sheetrock, so they can be installed by a finish crew using standard tools. The company has recently come out with a smaller scale module for use in residential contexts and for jobs smaller than typical commercial applications.
  
Being modular, of course, means the panels are flexible in terms of the overall size and configuration of the installation. That the modules are ‘pre-designed’ also brings an economy to the job insofar as it eliminates the need for costly customization while allowing for the creative disposition of the panels within the space.
The designs are on the whole abstract and freshly contemporary in appearance, with a taste of mid-century modern in a few of them. We also rather like that they’re uniformly white, which keeps the eye focused on the effects of light and shadow rather than be distracted by color or secondary patterns.
References:
modularArts
July 29th, 2010
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?
References
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
Screenplay for Hannah and Her Sisters by Woody Allen
Website for the Broadway Play Red by John Logan
July 5th, 2010
 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.
Websites:
Greg Lynn FORM
Blobwall by Greg Lynn
Blobwall Pavilion Blog
Blobwall Fabrication by Machineous
Rotational Molding by C-PAK Industries
Panelite
June 12th, 2010
“Lily”. Carpet formed from star-shaped leather modules. Produced by Mia Cullin.
We greatly admire the ‘soft’ work of Mia Cullin, a Swedish designer and interior architect. She designs what might be described as modular textile systems in traditional and modern materials. Her palette includes felt, Tyvek (a modern synthetic often used as a wrap in building construction), leather and wool. Cullin’s modules have the appearance of multi-lobed geometric figures suggesting flowers, snowflakes and other centralized figures drawn from organic nature. The undercutting of the shapes forming the perimeter allows the textile units to be joined together by folding and interlocking adjacent lobes. Together they weave a tapestry of repetitive forms whose uniformity is relieved by the play of light and shadow among the variously raised pieces of fabric. The natural wave of the assembled pieces, a judicious use of cut-out figures within some of the modular designs, and the natural surface texture of the materials adds to the visual play.
  
“Flake”. Star-shaped Tyvek modules joined together to form drapery and screens. Produced by Woodnotes.
Cullin’s work is conceived in the context of interior design, which is unsurprising in light of her professional training and activities. Variously described as ‘screens’ and ‘draperies’, her textile work bridges the realms of product and interior design, art and craft.
We recently enjoyed seeing one of her designs featured at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial in New York. She is a regular contributor to design fairs and exhibitions in Europe.
“Four Leaf Clover”. Leather carpet formed from clover-shaped modules. Produced by Mia Cullin.
From the designer’s website:
“Mia’s design is described as simple, poetic and elegant. Visualizing the object’s construction plays an important role. Many of her products contain a textile feeling where handicraft, folding and origami are sources of inspiration. Her works with assembled modules creating surfaces with relief patterns discerns a fascination for geometry.
Among her clients are Woodnotes, Nola, idea, Habitat, Ateljié Lyktan and Asplund.”
Designer’s website:
www.miacullin.com
Photography:
Top and bottom by Mathias Nero. Middle row by Sameli Rantanen.
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Mission 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.
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