Ken Isaacs, Urban Nomad

All the different ways of solving the shelter problem. To be static or mobile? Roots, legs, or wheels?
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Ego
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Ken Isaacs, Urban Nomad

Post by Ego »

https://metropolismag.com/profiles/ken- ... y-we-live/
the Matrix (is) a modular three-dimensional unit called the Living Structure that he created in 1949 while studying at Bradley University, and later perfected in 1954 while a graduate student at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. The Living Structure, with its integrated furniture and spindly, grid-like structure, was designed to liberate inhabitants from the postwar glut of expansion and consumption by recalibrating the way space was used, allowing for a bedroom, living room, and personal office to coexist in a single architectural frame. By making the design simple enough that it could be built by hand in an afternoon, Isaacs sought also to deliver the Living Structure inhabitant from the pressures of consumerism and rewire them for hardy self-sufficiency. “Every new acquisition just loads us down with more obligations and expenses in time and productive effort,” he would later write in 1974’s Living Structures. “It’s become evident that this is a crusher, leaving little time for inventive work and the individual search for peace of mind.”

and

...where he would spend the next decade developing more environmentally conscious applications of his Matrix philosophy. The resulting Microhouses were his largest creations yet: freestanding grid-based structures that rejected what Snodgrass calls “modernism’s penchant for permanence and monumentality” in favor of mobility and flexibility.
Image

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mountainFrugal
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Re: Ken Isaacs, Urban Nomad

Post by mountainFrugal »

Cool article. These structures remind me of various projects outlined in Design Like You Give A Damn: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/441 ... ive_a_Damn

guitarplayer
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Re: Ken Isaacs, Urban Nomad

Post by guitarplayer »

Good.

http://www.cubeproject.org.uk/qb2/

Somewhat similar (but will take more time than one afternoon to assemble) modern version by Dr Page from the University of Hertfordshire.

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Slevin
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Re: Ken Isaacs, Urban Nomad

Post by Slevin »

Ken isaacs, Nomadic furniture, and other simple modular building systems are something I want to spend a few years playing with when I actually have any space to put large toys / a workspace or decent yard for building stuff. Average houses have always baffled me in why some things are normal (sink, couch, stairs, doors) but other things don't exist in them normally (hammock floor, monkey bars, slides). My hot take is that modernity warped the fun out of living because it wasn't efficient / it was less safe. You can tell because almost any child would choose the fun house over the "normal modern house". Who wouldn't want to take the slide to downstairs to grab your coffee in the morning instead of the stairs?

sky
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Re: Ken Isaacs, Urban Nomad

Post by sky »

Your friendly local building inspector would like to have a word with you regarding the building code.

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Re: Ken Isaacs, Urban Nomad

Post by candide »

Isaac's book is a real trip. If you can get used to the weird prose, it would serve as a good introduction to a system of building. I find the prose itself amusing with ideas in the spirit of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with dashes of Buckminster Fuller, but more breathless, almost like On the Road.

http://letsremake.info/PDFs/k_isaacs.pdf

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Re: Ken Isaacs, Urban Nomad

Post by jacob »

Grid beams is mostly for people who prefer nuts and bolts to chopsaws and pocket hole jigs(*). What the latter wastes in terms of making beams shorter when rebuilding furniture, the former wastes in terms of beams that are too long to be in use.

(*) As far as I know, this is a recent invention.

IOW, I think gridbeams and the likes have been superseded by "2x4 furniture".

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Slevin
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Re: Ken Isaacs, Urban Nomad

Post by Slevin »

I built some gridbeam for fun a couple months back, and I have to say it was incredibly wasteful from a time perspective. Each 48 inch piece of gridbeam took me about 2 hours to construct using a drill press, and while I imagine I could improve that 25-50% with getting better at it, that’s still ridiculously long when in could have constructed whole furniture I wanted to make (small shelving unit) in just 2-4 hours with simpler construction methods, and using a chopsaw or circular saw which are waaaaay easier to borrow than a drill press.

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