architecture
Design Science Revolution
06/07/08 Filed in: Ideas
There is a "The Design
Science Revolution" sweeping across the cultural
landscape these days.
This group of exciting articles and pictures about the Godfather of the Sustainability movement are most likely in anticipation of the Whitney Museum exhibition, Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, opening later this month. With the inflated price of oil, food shortages in China and a US recession looming on the horizon, seems we are are primed and ready for Fuller's visionary environmental ideas.
DYMAXION MAN: The Visions of Buckminster Fuller from the New Yorker
WEIRD SCIENCE Slideshow from the New Yorker Online
This multipart GUIDE to R.Buckminster Fuller was in GOOD magazine back in 2007
More about Fuller is in some of the first posts to this blog, May 07 MACHINES FOR LIVING.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
-R.Buckminster Fuller
UPDATE: LETTERS DECODE THE MYTH OF R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER from the NY Times Architecture section
This group of exciting articles and pictures about the Godfather of the Sustainability movement are most likely in anticipation of the Whitney Museum exhibition, Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, opening later this month. With the inflated price of oil, food shortages in China and a US recession looming on the horizon, seems we are are primed and ready for Fuller's visionary environmental ideas.
DYMAXION MAN: The Visions of Buckminster Fuller from the New Yorker
WEIRD SCIENCE Slideshow from the New Yorker Online
This multipart GUIDE to R.Buckminster Fuller was in GOOD magazine back in 2007
More about Fuller is in some of the first posts to this blog, May 07 MACHINES FOR LIVING.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
-R.Buckminster Fuller
UPDATE: LETTERS DECODE THE MYTH OF R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER from the NY Times Architecture section
Building and their documentation
04/14/08 Filed in: Art
It was an architecturally infused weekend.
Friday night was the
Storefront for Art & Architecture
Pop-Up
gallery opening. The temporary gallery is located in
one of the busiest sections of Hollywood and
illuminated by the flashing red lights of a Go-Go
Girl club next door. The design of this show is
fantastic and Frederic Chaubin's Cosmic Communist
Constructions photographs are totally curious and
beautiful. I cannot wait to go back to the show when
it is not so packed & wish there was a book based
on this exhibition.
Saturday night we headed to the other side of Los
Angeles to attend the screening of Schindler's
Houses, by German filmmaker Heinz Emigholz hosted by
the UCLA Film and Television Archives. Rudolph M.
Schindler was a Viennese architect, who worked in Los
Angeles from the 1920- 1950s and had a significant
impact on this city, primarily with his single-family
home designs. While he is not my favorite architect,
I love the way his houses feel natural and
light-filled. His designs fuse the outside with the
interior space, resulting in houses that feel like
they are floating or built into the trees and
hillsides.
The impact R.M. Schindler made on southern California
modernism is significant and deep. Schindler came to
the United States in 1914 and began working with
Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin in 1918. In 1922 he
& his wife began the construction of their Kings
Road home (now the
MAK Center).
The construction of his Kings Road home used his
"Slab-Tilt" system of prefabricated slabs of natural
colored concrete. The architect Richard Neutra and
his family were among the Los Angeles vanguard who
lived in the guest quarters on this property during
the 1920s
The Saturday night screening was part of the
city-wide retrospective of Emigholz's films. I
enjoyed the opportunity it provided us to peek inside
Schindler's houses and we were engaged by some of the
sound editing techniques Emigholz employed, but
generally speaking it was a slow moving 90-minute
film that perhaps had too rigid a structure, for my
taste. A few moments of comic relief were provided by
three cats unexpectedly caught perching or posing, or
when the bright yellow SUV came roaring past, loudly
slicing open the neutral calm of Emigholz's still
shots.
The Billy WIlder Theater at the Hammer Museum is
quite nice, but I was annoyed by the attitude of the
organizers and that the screening was disorganized,
starting almost 45 minutes late. Being an organizer
myself, I am empathetic to the potential difficulties
that can arise with public programs: no one comes,
too many people come, it rains, it is too hot, the
machine breaks, the artist freaks... But in this
case, ticket sales were in advance & they knew it
would be sold out.
House of the Century
03/29/08 Filed in: Art
In honor of the Ant Farm retrospective in Sevilla, which I just read about on the fantastic blog We Make Money Not Art, I could not resist reblogging this video of Ant Farm's The House of the Century, 1972. One of the major disappointments of my year in Texas was that I never visited this house. While the house is in ruins, it would be worth a trip back to the Bayou City (Houston) to visit.
Closest we got was when Johnny did a live video performance in collaboration with the talented and lovely (and radical) string quartet ETHEL, in the Media Room from The House of the Century. This room construction was salvaged and re-created inside the University of Houston School of Architecture during the Blaffer Gallery's 2005 Ant Farm exhibition. If you happen to be passing through the UH campus, go and ask for a tour from someone in the office of the School of Architecture.
Musing upon what I would do, if I had the personal funding to commission my own house of the century. I would likely call upon the collaborative Simparch, because I am enamored with their Quonset Hut rehab, Clean Livin'. This is a self-contained live/work space that employs renewable energy and is a functioning part of the artist in residence program at the CLUI South Base in Wendover, UT. (shown below)
I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original
03/20/08 Filed in: Ideas
Reyner Banham, the British
architectural critic and historian, keeps coming
up. I am currently working on an article about
CLUI's recent residency in
Houston,TX and read that Banham felt that city
was 'like a real life-life version of a Monopoly
game', as he saw 1970s Houston as
'simultaneously wide open and impenetrable' and
felt the renegade city made "Los Angeles in the
Chinatown epoch seem like a socialist
economy" because Houston's "property wheels and
deals operated with less restrictions than
anywhere else in the Anglo Saxon world".
This morning as I was preparing to buy the new book Polar Inertia: The Migrating and Emergent City, once again Reyner Banham came up. In the book summary as he was quoted as describing Los Angeles as a city in which "mobility outweighs monumentality". All this Banham synchronicity is simply a great excuse to post this quirky but seminal video "Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles". Originally produced as a TV documentary by the BBC after Banham's "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" was published in 1971, thanks to ArtTorrents and UBUweb it has become a cult favorite, an alternative "LA101".
"I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original"- Reyner Banham
This morning as I was preparing to buy the new book Polar Inertia: The Migrating and Emergent City, once again Reyner Banham came up. In the book summary as he was quoted as describing Los Angeles as a city in which "mobility outweighs monumentality". All this Banham synchronicity is simply a great excuse to post this quirky but seminal video "Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles". Originally produced as a TV documentary by the BBC after Banham's "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" was published in 1971, thanks to ArtTorrents and UBUweb it has become a cult favorite, an alternative "LA101".
"I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original"- Reyner Banham
From the Brooklyn G Train to the Burnside Bridge
12/27/07 Filed in: Ideas
We have been laying low in a subleased apartment
(which includes a rental cat) in Clinton Hill,
Brooklyn. Since this is a neighborhood I do not know
very well and the rainy weather in New York is
preventing much exploration- we are using this time
to bone up on 'computer stuff'. I have done some
minor improvements to my blog, which include this new
title photo that Andrea Grover
took on one of our trips to the Buffalo Bayou in
Houston. Thanks Andrea! We finally installed
Leopard onto our computers and are starting to
work on a new NodeVideo website, in
preparation for our return from the world-wide
tour in June 08 and the conclusion of
Towards A New Architecture.
In the midst of all this downloading and file sharing, we are having that perennial conversation about where we should move to next.
Head West Young Lass
Urban: Top of our list for years has been the glorious (although damp) city of Portland, Oregon. Although I struggle with anxiety about climate change (cool grey days) and the economics (will we be able to pay the bills as we launch out with NodeVideo without the safety net of my dayjob), I am excited by the scale of the city (biking/walkable neighborhoods) and the city-wide emphasis on sustainable, community-initated development. In the background Johnny keeps whispering "Ah, that sweet Oregon air", the phrase a man once uttered to us outside the PDX airport.
Desert: I love the dry air and blue sky of the West Coast desert. There are days I can think of nowhere more perfect than a little Adobe house in Joshua Tree, Los Angeles or Tucson. But is perfect weather really a reason to relocate somewhere? Nah, I mean we are not looking to retire.
Along these lines I am a daily reader of John Weeden's blog WeedenArtsWatch about life in Memphis, TN. I admire the excitement and commitment he feels for his hometown, even though we will not be heading South this time around.
How Hip is too Hip?
How much of the hype should you believe or ignore when considering a relocation? While working as curator at the Art Museum in Asheville, NC I was involved in a few projects that involved the local Chamber of Commerce. During this time the Chamber had a rebranding campaign going on and the city's new slogan was "Asheville, Any Way You Like it". Most of my friends and I agreed that this slogan sounded sexual, especially since Asheville has a rather risqué reputation throughout the Southern states. During this re-branding (sexing up) campaign there were at least 4 articles in the New York Times about this small city in the mountains of Western Carolina. Public Relations agencies know how to do their jobs when it comes to this stuff.
Before moving to Asheville, we lived in the belly of the beast, in that cusp of hipness, the border between Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I actually loved living here because it was easy to get into Manhattan one day on the L-train and really easy to feel far away the next, while riding your bike up and down Manhattan Ave- Brooklyn's little Poland. Greenpoint was the right scale neighborhood and the small food markets rocked. The only problem was the high cost of living but we found a clever and affortable solution, temporarily. We bought a 1969 camper on Ebay and drove it into Brooklyn from Michigan. The camper was parked inside the video studio (a former taxi garage) and VOILÁ we owned a small studio apartment close to the studio for the cost of one month's rent. After 6 months it started to get too cold for camper living in New York and we were getting tired of going down the block to shower at the YMCA. The decisive moment came when a woman I knew from the neighborhood was raped around the corner in broad daylight. It was time to end our experiment in urban homesteading and move down South, kicking off what would become our somewhat migratory lifestyle.
Before the little camper in Brooklyn, I lived for several years in Troy, New York. A city that seemed most proud of being the hometown of Uncle Sam, the guy in the big top hat who sold rotten meat the Army. But what attracted most of us to Troy was its proximity to New York (under 3 hours) and it was cheap. By cheap I mean $500 apartments in regal old brownstones or the 5,000 square foot loft along the Hudson River that we rented for $800 a month. Sure the loft was cold as hell in the winter but is obviously the biggest place that I will ever live. It was a 'land rich, cash poor' city, good for young artists who wanted to experiment without lots of commercial pressures and within a supportive small community. That said, Troy was defiantly a rundown post-industrial cities where you needed to make your own entertainment and espresso. So I almost choked recently when a guy in Houston told me that he considered Troy to be "the San Francisco of the the East". Who created that slogan? and could it possibly be true? Had the city changed that much since 2002 or was it all hype?
In searching for our city of the future we are weighing many new options, grown up options, of what makes for a great place to live. I am trying to avoid places that reference Richard Florida's ubiquitous book The Rise of the Creative Class and wish that I could consult with Jane Jacobs, the activist who championed community-based city planning and wrote the personally influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In the midst of making Pro-Con lists and daydreaming about the future, I find myself returning to Chas Bowie's fantastic article "The H-Word Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Word "Hipster" especially today after seeing this snarky picture-post on the Portland Public Art blog.
Update: Frank Rose just sent me this link about the various attempts to rebrand the image of Houston. In the year 1915 the city leaders of Houston created the slogan "Houston: Where seventeen railroads meet the sea" in an effort to rebrand the city as the railroad center of the Southwest. Imagine that.
In the midst of all this downloading and file sharing, we are having that perennial conversation about where we should move to next.
Head West Young Lass
Urban: Top of our list for years has been the glorious (although damp) city of Portland, Oregon. Although I struggle with anxiety about climate change (cool grey days) and the economics (will we be able to pay the bills as we launch out with NodeVideo without the safety net of my dayjob), I am excited by the scale of the city (biking/walkable neighborhoods) and the city-wide emphasis on sustainable, community-initated development. In the background Johnny keeps whispering "Ah, that sweet Oregon air", the phrase a man once uttered to us outside the PDX airport.
Desert: I love the dry air and blue sky of the West Coast desert. There are days I can think of nowhere more perfect than a little Adobe house in Joshua Tree, Los Angeles or Tucson. But is perfect weather really a reason to relocate somewhere? Nah, I mean we are not looking to retire.
Along these lines I am a daily reader of John Weeden's blog WeedenArtsWatch about life in Memphis, TN. I admire the excitement and commitment he feels for his hometown, even though we will not be heading South this time around.
How Hip is too Hip?
How much of the hype should you believe or ignore when considering a relocation? While working as curator at the Art Museum in Asheville, NC I was involved in a few projects that involved the local Chamber of Commerce. During this time the Chamber had a rebranding campaign going on and the city's new slogan was "Asheville, Any Way You Like it". Most of my friends and I agreed that this slogan sounded sexual, especially since Asheville has a rather risqué reputation throughout the Southern states. During this re-branding (sexing up) campaign there were at least 4 articles in the New York Times about this small city in the mountains of Western Carolina. Public Relations agencies know how to do their jobs when it comes to this stuff.
Before moving to Asheville, we lived in the belly of the beast, in that cusp of hipness, the border between Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I actually loved living here because it was easy to get into Manhattan one day on the L-train and really easy to feel far away the next, while riding your bike up and down Manhattan Ave- Brooklyn's little Poland. Greenpoint was the right scale neighborhood and the small food markets rocked. The only problem was the high cost of living but we found a clever and affortable solution, temporarily. We bought a 1969 camper on Ebay and drove it into Brooklyn from Michigan. The camper was parked inside the video studio (a former taxi garage) and VOILÁ we owned a small studio apartment close to the studio for the cost of one month's rent. After 6 months it started to get too cold for camper living in New York and we were getting tired of going down the block to shower at the YMCA. The decisive moment came when a woman I knew from the neighborhood was raped around the corner in broad daylight. It was time to end our experiment in urban homesteading and move down South, kicking off what would become our somewhat migratory lifestyle.
Before the little camper in Brooklyn, I lived for several years in Troy, New York. A city that seemed most proud of being the hometown of Uncle Sam, the guy in the big top hat who sold rotten meat the Army. But what attracted most of us to Troy was its proximity to New York (under 3 hours) and it was cheap. By cheap I mean $500 apartments in regal old brownstones or the 5,000 square foot loft along the Hudson River that we rented for $800 a month. Sure the loft was cold as hell in the winter but is obviously the biggest place that I will ever live. It was a 'land rich, cash poor' city, good for young artists who wanted to experiment without lots of commercial pressures and within a supportive small community. That said, Troy was defiantly a rundown post-industrial cities where you needed to make your own entertainment and espresso. So I almost choked recently when a guy in Houston told me that he considered Troy to be "the San Francisco of the the East". Who created that slogan? and could it possibly be true? Had the city changed that much since 2002 or was it all hype?
In searching for our city of the future we are weighing many new options, grown up options, of what makes for a great place to live. I am trying to avoid places that reference Richard Florida's ubiquitous book The Rise of the Creative Class and wish that I could consult with Jane Jacobs, the activist who championed community-based city planning and wrote the personally influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In the midst of making Pro-Con lists and daydreaming about the future, I find myself returning to Chas Bowie's fantastic article "The H-Word Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Word "Hipster" especially today after seeing this snarky picture-post on the Portland Public Art blog.
Update: Frank Rose just sent me this link about the various attempts to rebrand the image of Houston. In the year 1915 the city leaders of Houston created the slogan "Houston: Where seventeen railroads meet the sea" in an effort to rebrand the city as the railroad center of the Southwest. Imagine that.
Beautiful
10/31/07
Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House in Palm
Springs, California
From the New York Times:
The Kaufmann House is one of the best-known designs by Neutra, a Viennese-born architect who moved to the US in the 1920s and designed homes for the few decades for many wealthy West Coast clients. His buildings are seen virtually was the apotheosis of Modernism's International Style, with their skeletal steel frames and open plans. Yet Neutra was also known for catering sensitively to the needs of his clients, so that their houses would be not only functional but also nurture their owners psychologically.
From the New York Times:
The Kaufmann House is one of the best-known designs by Neutra, a Viennese-born architect who moved to the US in the 1920s and designed homes for the few decades for many wealthy West Coast clients. His buildings are seen virtually was the apotheosis of Modernism's International Style, with their skeletal steel frames and open plans. Yet Neutra was also known for catering sensitively to the needs of his clients, so that their houses would be not only functional but also nurture their owners psychologically.
Super towers of the future
08/18/07 Filed in: Rambling
Today we are playing at an outdoor amphitheater in Toronto, which stands in the shadow of the The CN Tower, "Canada's wonder of the world". This tower was built in 1976 and is still the world's tallest free-standing structure on land, although a proposed tower in Dubai is set to surpass it in 2009. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Toronto was a booming 'City of the Future' (much like Dubai today) and the tower was a potent symbol of the strength of Canadian industry. The CV Tower has even been named one of the Seven Wonders of the World by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
There are several other significant towers in the world, but Berlin & Seattle have my two favorites. Berlin's TV Tower/ Fernsehturm was built between 1965 and 1969 by the former German Democratic Republic, as a monument to the power of Socialism in Germany. On my 30th birthday, Jdk & I went up there to celebrate while looking down upon the dynamic Alexanderplatz and surrounding Berlin. The Space Needle in Seattle, Washington was built in 1962 for the World's Fair and stands as a reminder of the sci-fi Future City, a vision that looks so retro today.
machines for living
05/14/07 Filed in: Ideas
MACHINES FOR
LIVING: FAILURE
The Supine Dome
If you have spent enough time with me you are sure to have heard about my interest in Geodesic domes. It is not a nostalgia for the 1960s or some latent hippiness that drives my leisure pursuit. I have heard about how awful it was to live in a dome; they leaked, privacy was nill as they were impossible to soundproof. But for me the Geodesic dome is a great symbol- a sign of both utopian vision and also spectacular failure.
R. Buckminster Fuller, Elaine de Kooning and Josef Albers working on the first domes at Black Mountain College.
The dome uses the "doing more with less" idea in that it encloses the largest volume of interior space with the least amount of surface area thus saving on materials and cost. At Black Mountain College in 1948 and ’49, Fuller and students spent a great deal of time working on the design and construction of geodesic domes. In 1948, their attempt to build the first large-scale dome with venetian blind strips failed, and the structure was subsequently referred to as the “Supine Dome”. The next summer, working with a slightly larger budget and thicker blinds, they were successful.
- Excerpt from Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center, Asheville, NC
Then you have the idealistic artists of Drop City, the squatter style commune that sprang up in south eastern Colorado in 1965 as "land to be open and free to the people." This commune was immortalized in the 1970 "back to the land" bible Shelter, published in 1973 and these images endure as some of the most iconic images of the 1960s counter-cultural buildings. The original four founders of the project were inspired by the architectural ideas of Buckminister Fuller and the art "happenings" of Allan Kaprow, both of which originated at Black Mountain College. By 1968 Drop City and was overrun with hippies & drugs and the original settlers moved down the mountains and into Boulder, CO.
There is much to be learned from FAILURE and here is a book project that recently caught my attention:
Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices has been published by The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. A book of essays, interviews and artwork that together offer a minor history of failure. Tracing the idea of failure through contemporary art, activism and social protest movements, literature and philosophy, the work in Failure! cuts against a notion of forward progress by instead exploring various dead-ends on the timeline of history. Failure! gives us ways to map our lives in relationship to improper paths. From Valerie Solanas to the Weather Underground, and beyond (and behind).
Available at AK Press
Hopefully soon I will have a profile here with David McConville, co-founder of The Elumenati immersive projection design firm and one of my favorite people to talk with about domes, Buckminster Fuller and the early films of Charles and Ray Eames.
The Supine Dome
If you have spent enough time with me you are sure to have heard about my interest in Geodesic domes. It is not a nostalgia for the 1960s or some latent hippiness that drives my leisure pursuit. I have heard about how awful it was to live in a dome; they leaked, privacy was nill as they were impossible to soundproof. But for me the Geodesic dome is a great symbol- a sign of both utopian vision and also spectacular failure.
R. Buckminster Fuller, Elaine de Kooning and Josef Albers working on the first domes at Black Mountain College.
The dome uses the "doing more with less" idea in that it encloses the largest volume of interior space with the least amount of surface area thus saving on materials and cost. At Black Mountain College in 1948 and ’49, Fuller and students spent a great deal of time working on the design and construction of geodesic domes. In 1948, their attempt to build the first large-scale dome with venetian blind strips failed, and the structure was subsequently referred to as the “Supine Dome”. The next summer, working with a slightly larger budget and thicker blinds, they were successful.
- Excerpt from Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center, Asheville, NC
Then you have the idealistic artists of Drop City, the squatter style commune that sprang up in south eastern Colorado in 1965 as "land to be open and free to the people." This commune was immortalized in the 1970 "back to the land" bible Shelter, published in 1973 and these images endure as some of the most iconic images of the 1960s counter-cultural buildings. The original four founders of the project were inspired by the architectural ideas of Buckminister Fuller and the art "happenings" of Allan Kaprow, both of which originated at Black Mountain College. By 1968 Drop City and was overrun with hippies & drugs and the original settlers moved down the mountains and into Boulder, CO.
There is much to be learned from FAILURE and here is a book project that recently caught my attention:
Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices has been published by The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. A book of essays, interviews and artwork that together offer a minor history of failure. Tracing the idea of failure through contemporary art, activism and social protest movements, literature and philosophy, the work in Failure! cuts against a notion of forward progress by instead exploring various dead-ends on the timeline of history. Failure! gives us ways to map our lives in relationship to improper paths. From Valerie Solanas to the Weather Underground, and beyond (and behind).
Available at AK Press
Hopefully soon I will have a profile here with David McConville, co-founder of The Elumenati immersive projection design firm and one of my favorite people to talk with about domes, Buckminster Fuller and the early films of Charles and Ray Eames.
machines for living
05/13/07 Filed in: Ideas
MACHINES FOR
LIVING: SHELTER
Before it's time- The Dymaxion House
The prototype of Buckminster Fuller's dynamically efficient prefab home from 1948 is entombed at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
During his career, Fuller was awarded twenty-five U.S. patents, authored twenty-eight books, and received forty-seven honorary doctorates. Best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome, "Bucky" campaigned his entire life for responsible conservation of the earth's resources to avoid ecological disaster. He emphasized technological efficiency by insisting on getting "more with less", coined the term "Spaceship Earth", and is considered one of the founders of the environmental design movement.
1945, the Dymaxion House was Fuller's solution to the need for a mass-produced, affordable, easily transportable and environmentally efficient house. The word "Dymaxion" was coined by combining parts of three of Bucky's favorite words: DY (dynamic), MAX (maximum), and ION (tension). The house used tension suspension from a central column or mast, sold for the price of a Cadillac, and could be shipped worldwide in its own metal tube. Toward the end of WW II, Fuller attempted to create a new industry for mass-producing Dymaxion Houses.
After WWII, Fuller convinced Beech Aircraft of Wichita, Kansas, to work with him to bring his Dymaxion House to life. The aircraft factory was the perfect choice as materials used in both the Dymaxion House and airplanes were very similar. Unfortunately, "Bucky" would not compromise his design which led to disagreement among the associates of the newly formed Fuller Houses Inc. and ultimately to the collapse of the company. The only two prototypes of the round, aluminum house were purchased by investor William Graham. In 1948, Graham constructed a hybridized version of the Dymaxion House as his family's home; the Grahams lived there into the 1970s.
See More, Do More, Live More- The Airstream
Wally Byam's shiny trailers hit the road in 1936 at the height of the Great Depression. These factory produced mobile homes were made from lightweight, durable aluminum designed for aircrafts during the first World War.
Check out the amazing Weblog Tour America from Rich, Eleanor and Emma, the "full-timing" family and editor of Airstream Life magazine.
Pre-Fab Modernism- The Dwell Magazine Revolution ?
I heard Office of Mobile Design's Jennifer Siegal speak last month in Chicago at the C6 Symposium. Siegal might be best known for her Swellhouse pre-fab home design produced for the Dwell House Invitational. OMD's perspective is reactive, visionary and yet practical.
Check out the OMD Globetrotter, a mobile theater that unfolds from a cargo truck container and is described as "cross-breeding of high theater and high camping." (might use this later to describe my life)
While the re-use of cargo containers can be appropriate in temporary or dire situations (see the Rx Box project headed up by "me ex") there are some drawbacks to this recycling. Cargo containers are uninsulated and get too hot in some climates and too cold in others. Also when you cut into them to make a door or window the structural integrity of the steel is compromised.
OMD's philosophy is to focus on and design for our mobile lives. Bravo! I will skip over the Paul Virilio quotes and just let you listen to Jennifer Siegal in this video:
West Coast Choppers meets Prefab Modernism
This is a sexy little video about prefab production by Marmol Radziner. Like OMD, this team is building prefab model homes in the high desert outside Los Angeles.
Matt Coolidge, the Director of CLUI and docent of our recent bus trip along Highway 62 commented that the openness of the high desert is not just a way of thinking about landscape. The openness of the desert extends to social norms (more personal freedom), spirituality (UFO landings and New Age retreats) and to an open environment for experimental architecture (because of open, cheap land.) While none of these modern prefab firms are building "affordable housing" (a big critique) they are operating in a utopian tradition of social and physical experimentation taking place out in the desert.
Before it's time- The Dymaxion House
The prototype of Buckminster Fuller's dynamically efficient prefab home from 1948 is entombed at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
During his career, Fuller was awarded twenty-five U.S. patents, authored twenty-eight books, and received forty-seven honorary doctorates. Best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome, "Bucky" campaigned his entire life for responsible conservation of the earth's resources to avoid ecological disaster. He emphasized technological efficiency by insisting on getting "more with less", coined the term "Spaceship Earth", and is considered one of the founders of the environmental design movement.
1945, the Dymaxion House was Fuller's solution to the need for a mass-produced, affordable, easily transportable and environmentally efficient house. The word "Dymaxion" was coined by combining parts of three of Bucky's favorite words: DY (dynamic), MAX (maximum), and ION (tension). The house used tension suspension from a central column or mast, sold for the price of a Cadillac, and could be shipped worldwide in its own metal tube. Toward the end of WW II, Fuller attempted to create a new industry for mass-producing Dymaxion Houses.
After WWII, Fuller convinced Beech Aircraft of Wichita, Kansas, to work with him to bring his Dymaxion House to life. The aircraft factory was the perfect choice as materials used in both the Dymaxion House and airplanes were very similar. Unfortunately, "Bucky" would not compromise his design which led to disagreement among the associates of the newly formed Fuller Houses Inc. and ultimately to the collapse of the company. The only two prototypes of the round, aluminum house were purchased by investor William Graham. In 1948, Graham constructed a hybridized version of the Dymaxion House as his family's home; the Grahams lived there into the 1970s.
See More, Do More, Live More- The Airstream
Wally Byam's shiny trailers hit the road in 1936 at the height of the Great Depression. These factory produced mobile homes were made from lightweight, durable aluminum designed for aircrafts during the first World War.
Check out the amazing Weblog Tour America from Rich, Eleanor and Emma, the "full-timing" family and editor of Airstream Life magazine.
Pre-Fab Modernism- The Dwell Magazine Revolution ?
I heard Office of Mobile Design's Jennifer Siegal speak last month in Chicago at the C6 Symposium. Siegal might be best known for her Swellhouse pre-fab home design produced for the Dwell House Invitational. OMD's perspective is reactive, visionary and yet practical.
Check out the OMD Globetrotter, a mobile theater that unfolds from a cargo truck container and is described as "cross-breeding of high theater and high camping." (might use this later to describe my life)
While the re-use of cargo containers can be appropriate in temporary or dire situations (see the Rx Box project headed up by "me ex") there are some drawbacks to this recycling. Cargo containers are uninsulated and get too hot in some climates and too cold in others. Also when you cut into them to make a door or window the structural integrity of the steel is compromised.
OMD's philosophy is to focus on and design for our mobile lives. Bravo! I will skip over the Paul Virilio quotes and just let you listen to Jennifer Siegal in this video:
West Coast Choppers meets Prefab Modernism
This is a sexy little video about prefab production by Marmol Radziner. Like OMD, this team is building prefab model homes in the high desert outside Los Angeles.
Matt Coolidge, the Director of CLUI and docent of our recent bus trip along Highway 62 commented that the openness of the high desert is not just a way of thinking about landscape. The openness of the desert extends to social norms (more personal freedom), spirituality (UFO landings and New Age retreats) and to an open environment for experimental architecture (because of open, cheap land.) While none of these modern prefab firms are building "affordable housing" (a big critique) they are operating in a utopian tradition of social and physical experimentation taking place out in the desert.
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05/12/07 Filed in: Art
The “Contentment House” is for Sale
Desert Hot Springs Motel, located on the outskirts of Palm Springs, is composed of four intimate interlocking units, each with its own patio and cacti garden. The structure is gunite (sprayed concrete), steel, glass and redwood.
In 1927, Lucien Hubbard, a Hollywood writer and producer purchased property on the outskirts of Palm Springs in what would become Desert Hot Springs and began the development of a private Hollywood guest ranch, the B Bar H Ranch. The early Hollywood crowd would come out and spend time horseback riding, playing tennis, swimming and retreating from the movie industry out in the desert. Mary Pickford, Bing Crosby, the Marx Brothers, Tyrone Power, Lionel Barrymore, Peter Lorre, Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper were some of the guests who would frequent his ranch. Before World War II, Hubbard sold his ranch and went into the war as a war correspondent for “Reader’s Digest”. He appears as himself in “The Story of GI Joe” (1945). After the war, Hubbard commissioned John Lautner to build the Desert Hot Springs Motel, which was originally referred to as “Contentment House”. The original plans were quite extensive, with numerous spa buildings and retail shopping. Only the four rooms of the motel were built along with the swimming pools. The swimming pools, which were located across the street from the motel, were torn down in the early 1970s by developers. After many years of being closed to the public, Steve Lowe purchased the legendary Desert Hot Springs Motel in 2000 and, after renovating it, reopened the motel. He passed away in January.
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