Ken Isaacs, Urban Nomad
Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2022 2:17 pm
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.