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!
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 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.
This is the first of several posts we’ll be doing over the next few weeks to highlight some of the customizable product designs we’ve assembled at the A.R.T. | Module R popup shop, now running at 400 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, New York.
Jewelry is among the most intimate of wearable objects, often placed directly against the skin and in some cases actually piercing it. What better article, then, to endow with the properties of co-creativity than jewelry, the ornament of the self? Indeed, one of the principal attractions of co-creative, participatory design is that the interaction between user and object bonds the two in a more direct way than is the case with things acquired in a fully formed state. That’s only natural where there develops a feeling of co-ownership, a sense that the user played some part in the conception of the object. With its small scale and simplicity of function, jewelry would seem to particularly well suited to formal manipulation by the non-expert. (Not to mention the fact that reconfigurable design gives the user a lot more bang for the buck as well as flexibility when it comes to accessorizing different outfits.)
Brandon Perhacs: Stix+Stones
Designed by Brandon Perhacs, Stix+Stones is a line of jewelry that gives the wearer the ability to create a diverse array of sculptural compositions using the two fundamental geometries of sphere and rod. The innovative design potential of Stix+Stones is hidden inside the hand-brushed stainless steel rods, or “stix”, which contain invisible magnetic stops positioned at precise intervals along their length. The magnetized design allows the user to play freely with the components, while at the same time ensuring that the parts array themselves in an elegantly symmetrical manner.
The full necklace cord comes with six brushed stainless steel stix of assorted lengths, and six magnetic spheres of silver and black nickel. The length of the cord is 16″ long. Custom lengths are available upon request for an additional charge. .
Hila Rawet Karni: Industrial Jewelry
Hila Rawet Karni is a jewelry designer whose works have been featured throughout the world, from Tokyo and Design Basel in Miami to Tel Aviv, Milan, and London. Combining her background in industrial design, her knowledge of origami, and her impeccable fashion sense, Hila incorporates unusual materials to create unique, wearable pieces. Her Kishut collection is notable in utilizing a single module rendered in an industrial material, in different colors and with assorted connection hardware to form an unlimited number of necklace, earring and brooch designs.
Naturally, we find the idea of conjoining the somewhat oxymoronic terms “industrial” and “jewelry” very appealing, since it aligns with our own ideas about “industrialized art.”
Q: You are an industrial designer by trade. What prompted the interest in jewelry?
Hila: “In my work, I use silicon, paper, grommets, and stainless steel. As an industrial designer, I am fascinated by the idea of taking raw materials that are not usually used for jewelry and transforming them into wearable objects. I want to create jewelry that is beautiful and luxurious and is not made out of gold and silver.
A lot of my inspiration comes from my family and my childhood. My father is an industrial designer and my grandfather was a jeweler and woodworker. I have vivid memories of looking through albums of my grandfather’s works, and going through his origami books, trying to create the designs myself. Those experiences stuck with me, and influence my work.”
Hila’s pieces were featured in the recent exhibition “Technocraft,” curated by Yves Behar and held at the Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco.
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OHptions Modular Earrings by Ciclus
Ciclus is a design studio in Barcelona, Spain whose philosophy is grounded in the principles of sustainability, namely, to “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” Their fashion portfolio includes a design for modular earrings called OHptions (not sure where the unique spelling is coming from, but we get it). The components are made from recycled paper and silver. With a detachable circular disk ornaments and removable chains, the earrings can be configured in a variety of arrangements and graphic patterns. The interchangeability of the disks, of course, solves the age-old problem of color coordinating one’s apparel: rather than having to set aside a piece because it does not “go” with the current color scheme, one need only change the details of the piece, and then go.
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.
It was only recently that we stumbled on the work of Charlotte Posenenske, a German artist who was born in 1930 and survived life in Nazi Germany during World War II despite her partially Jewish heritage. Posenenske’s story is remarkable in a number of ways, not the least of which is that she is best known for a tiny body of work produced in just two years of a truncated ten-year career in visual art. That her tenure as an artist was relatively short had nothing to do with her passing in 1985 from the effects of cancer: rather, she had deliberately walked away from the art world seventeen years earlier, in 1968, never to look back again despite invitations for her to return. Instead, she spent the last part of her life pursuing a career as a sociologist, studying the effects of industrialization on organized labor.
Her choice of an alternative vocation, however, was not quite as disconnected from her preceding artistic pursuits as might seem the case at first glance. For in the sculptures for which she is now celebrated are interwoven some of the very same themes she would take up in her new profession: industrialism and its relationship to art and craft; how things are made and who is equipped to make them; and how we value objects in the marketplace. Imagine our excitement when we discovered that someone had been exploring several of the very concepts that interest us at A.R.T. today – only a half-century ago. Sure is hard to have an original idea around here!
The principal sculptures which we and others particularly admire were assembled by Posenenske from pieces which she designed to resemble ventilation ducts, such as one might find inside a building. Pieces were either of a rectangular, square or transitional section, and could be attached to each other with screws. Her choice of materials was limited to galvanized sheet metal and corrugated cardboard, with no hand-finishing or post-production treatment to pretty them up and belie their industrial origins.
As visually appealing as they may be in a purely formal sense, an important distinguishing feature of her duct sculptures is more conceptual than visual: that is, the pieces were designed by Posenenske to be re-configurable, meaning they could be detached and then re-attached in a myriad of different configurations. In other words, they were modular.
Posenenske put the fact of her sculpture’s modularity into practice by leaving it to curators to arrange the pieces as they saw fit when exhibited in galleries or curated spaces. By implication collectors and spectators would also be empowered to install them to their own specifications. For one event Posenenske herself choreographed a performance piece in which a crew of assistants dressed in white Lufthansa jumpsuits re-arranged a set of modules suspended from a ceiling in order to reinforce her ideas about the fluidity of their composition.
But her preferred environment for their display were public spaces, especially transportation nodes – airports, traffic islands, train stations. In part this stemmed from her political sensibilities; keep in mind this is all happening in 1967-68 when the counter-cultural wave of democratization and anti-establishmentarianism was about to reach a crescendo. The socially conscious Posenenske did not want her work to be the object of market speculation by collectors banking on their appreciation in value for reasons of a limited supply and the rising reputation of the artist. Besides physically locating her sculptures in more ‘democratic’ contexts than the privatized gallery space, Posenenske also intended for them to be produced in open edition and sold for the cost of their production.
If you’re familiar with some of the thinking behind the portfolio of work we offer through A.R.T., you can see immediately why we feel such a strong affinity for this fascinating figure.
Happily, public interest in Posenenske’s work seems to be rising again with a new book and catalogue, an exhibition at documenta 12 in 2007 and now, at the Artist’s Space in New York, a series of events and films (left) organized around the Vierkantrohe Series (Square Tube Series) of sculptures that we have focused on here. Part of the program at Artist’s Space faithfully reflects Posenenske’s attitude regarding the non-static character of art: four living artists have been invited to position the modules in the space to their liking over the course of successive weeks. Listen, if she was okay with some guys in Lufthansa suits playing around with her tubes, what harm could a few artists do?
Bottom: Moducool: Modular Vaccine Rucksack. Designed by Ian Friday (2010). Courtesy of Open Architecture Network.
Art and Design as a Return on Investment (ROI)
If the art market were a sport, then the painter Rackstraw Downes (b. 1939) should be credited with scoring a hat trick for appearing in no fewer than three different regional exhibitions at the same time: a small, focused show of his work at the Aldrich Contemporary Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut; a broader retrospective at the Parrish Museum in Southampton, New York; and an exhibit of his drawings at the Betty Cuningham Gallery in New York’s Chelsea art ghetto. Most artists would be thrilled to have any one of these events on his or her résumé; in fact, the only person who appears to be a more popular subject in these parts than Mr. Downes at the moment is Andy Warhol and, sadly, he’s not around to enjoy it.
Mr. Downes’ work is notable, among other things, for synthesizing two seemingly opposing impulses: on the one hand, to lovingly render the material world by means of a luminous and sensuous application of paint, and on the other hand, to choose as his subject matter some of the least visually appealing snapshots of the urban streetscape. But we’re not going to dwell here on Mr. Downes artistic accomplishments. Rather, what caught our eye in the review of his works that appeared in the Times was the reference to his painting of the underbelly of the Westside Highway pictured above having taken him fifteen months to complete.
Now, it’s not clear whether Mr. Downes spent these months working exclusively on this particular painting, or whether he is the sort to have several projects underway at the same time, but in either case we are reminded of the labor intensity of good old-fashioned plein-air easel painting. The hugeness of the time invested is only further amplified in our minds when we realize that the object which is born out of this endeavor is singular in nature – that is, there is and always will be only one painting to show for the effort (along with some notebooks compiled by Mr. Downes and, of course, a potentially infinite number of inferior mechanical reproductions). Only one person or institution will be able to own it, and a limited number of people able to view it.
By the laws of supply (necessarily low, given Mr. Downes’ working method) and demand (high, given the artist’s reputation and quality of work), the cost to acquire one of Mr. Downes’ works is no doubt very substantial. Which further means that only a limited number of people or institutions will be able to purchase it. Let’s not bemoan the fact or question the value of Mr. Downes’ work or the work of other artists who create by means of manual craft; this is how capitalism is played, and apparently nobody’s thought of a better way to do it.
Speaking of capitalism, these circumstances raise a question in our minds about value, or more particularly, about a return on investment (ROI) when it comes to objects of art and design: how do we measure the value of the work product relative to the amount of creative energy invested in producing it? In the case of “West Side Highway”, it’s fair to say that the high quality of the piece is offset by the large amount of time and effort needed to produce it and by the comparatively small size of the audience which will enjoy it, and therefore its relative valuation is at best, in strictly capitalistic terms, flat. Take a painting similarly composed by another artist who is lesser known or, um, emerging, and the valuation of the return on effort goes into negative territory since the sales price for such work is likely to be considerably less than Mr. Downes commands, and far fewer will clamor to see it.
Now let’s apply the same approach to assessing ROI for a work of modular art or design. In its most elemental form a single module deployed in multiples is sufficient to generate a piece that has the aesthetic integrity and critical mass to stand on its own, as in the illustrated example from the textile designer Mia Cullin (left). The greatest investment of creative energy required to realize Cullin’s concept no doubt went into the design of the individual module, which we can reasonably presume did not remotely approach the fifteen months needed to create the Downes canvas. Even adding in the time needed to evolve from individual module to concepts for assembled pieces, or the hours spent developing prototypes, or the interaction of the designer with the parties responsible for the physical production of the modules, would not greatly alter the disparity between the (hu)man-hours required for the two works. And if one objects to comparing a fine art painting with a textile design as a case of apples and oranges, we can reply that the very same point could have been made by referencing works by recognized modular artists like Sol Lewitt, Tony Smith, Norman Carlberg and others.
Having spent far fewer waking hours devising her module, Cullin was ostensibly free to design other modules and other pieces in the same amount of time it took Downes to make just one. But here is where the ROI of the modular approach really pays off: unlike the singular work of art, which is both the beginning and the end of itself, the design of the individual module spawns an infinite number of subsequent iterations, since it can be reproduced in unlimited quantities with no loss of artistic quality. When we figure in the limitless permutations that can be generated from the design of a single module, then the potential ROI of modular art and design balloons to an astronomically high figure.
Using slightly different terminology and a metric based purely in terms of energy versus output, we can say that modular art and design is by its nature a highly efficient system of both design and production, whereas the arduous practice of crafting fine art by hand is a largely inefficient means of value creation. Efficiency benefits the greatest number of people by producing the greatest amount of goods or services at the lowest cost; inefficiency yields a lower supply, an inflated price point and a necessarily restricted audience.
Which takes us, finally, the question of socially responsible design. If the modular method is in fact highly efficient and provides a high rate of return on the investment of creative energy, then it stands to bear that it is equally advantageous as a means of addressing the problems that afflict humankind, or at least those which can be ameliorated with the help of design. A recent project by Ian Friday for a modular vaccine rucksack, affectionately labeled Moducool (ah, a wordsmith after our own heart), reminds us that design can indeed solve problems beyond those of a purely aesthetic nature. And in a world of limited resources and a seemingly unlimited number of humanitarian ills, we need to “capitalize” on any expedient we can find.
Project Description of Moducool, via Open Architecture Network:
Function
Moducool is a modular vaccine rucksack designed to aid in the transportation and distribution of vital vaccine vials in rural areas of developing countries. Vaccine vials must be kept between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius, anything above or below and they start to lose potency. Millions of pounds worth of vaccines are wasted every year because of heat damage. Moducool features removable insulated modules that house custom-made icepacks allowing each module to be dedicated to particular communities, thus, ensuring that only the vaccines needed at any one point are exposed to heat. In the existing product, there is no other storage for syringes or anyway to dispose of medical waste. Moducool, however, features a removable sharps box and extra storage to ensure that the user takes away all the medical waste and can carry the vaccines with both hands free, making climbing mountains to reach remote communities much safer.
Inspiration
Inspiration came from a documentary on the immunization process within developing countries and witnessing aid workers struggling to carry the cumbersome existing product, a traditional cool box. The major flaw in the existing product is the fact that it only has a single chamber that the vials are stored in. As the aid workers tend to visit multiple communities within a day, with a single chamber, it results in all the vaccines being exposed to heat every time the lid is opened. The cold air is released and hot air enters, therefore, risking heat exposure to ALL the vials. The advantage of Moducool’s modular design is that only the vaccine vials required at certain locations are exposed to heat, thus, keeping more vials colder for longer which could potentially saves millions of dollars and lives.
Development
Development involved initial user, task and environment research to develop the idea in to a potential product. Many cardboard prototypes were made of various insulated rucksack forms and tested with potential users. A PDS was developed which adhered to World Health Organization criteria regarding vaccine transportation. A full working prototype was made by hand and was fully evaluated with potential users. Feedback was highly positive and users felt there was a real need for the product.
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.
