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  232. Miller, J. Abbott 10
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modularity

Close
  • It is a little world

    See how many a pretty thing
    I always from the cube can bring:
    Chair and sofa, bench and table,
    Desk to write at when I’m able,
    All the household furniture,
    Even baby’s bed I’m sure;
    Not a few such things I see;
    Stove and sideboard here can be.
    Many things, both old and new,
    My dear cube brings into view;
    So my cube much pleases me,
    Because through it so much I see.
    It is a little world.

    Ellen Lupton & J. Abbott Miller, The ABC's of ▲■●: The Bauhaus and Design Theory
    1. ​​Cubed​​
    • modularity

    I wish I knew the source.

    I can't help but interpret the word "cube" in this poem as referring to a cubicle, which makes it seem a little sad.

  • Chopped and disfigured

    The details of a building cannot be made alive when they are made from modular parts

    If the builder wants to build the room from modular four-foot panels, he must change the size of the rooms, and change their shape, to fit his panels.

    In such a building system, it is impossible for a person to create a plan which reflects the larger subtleties of site or plan. Each plan will always be chopped and disfigured to make it fit the building details.

    To make the building live, its patterns must be generated on the site, so that each one takes its own shape according to its context.

    Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
    1. ​​What's suitable for each unique condition​​
    • modularity
  • Modularity

    One of the most pervasive features of these buildings is the fact that they are “modular.” They are full of identical concrete blocks, identical rooms, identical houses, identical apartments in identical apartment buildings. The idea that a building can - and ought - to be made of modular units is one of the most pervasive assumptions of twentieth-century architecture.

    Nature is never modular. Nature is full of almost similar units (waves, raindrops, blades of grass) - but though the units of one kind are all alike in their broad structure, no two are ever alike in detail.

    The same broad features keep recurring over and over again. And yet, in their detailed appearance these broad features are never twice the same.

    Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
    • nature
    • architecture
    • making
    • details
    • modularity

    On traditional cultures and their building processes, Alexander expands this view:

    Each building was a member of a family, and yet unique.
    Each room a little different according to the view.
    Each tile is set a little differently in the ground, according to the settling of the earth.

  • Quaker Square Inn

    IMG_3414.jpeg

    The modernist architect Le Corbusier was an admirer of American grain elevators, suggesting that their regularity and modularity could serve as a model for other kinds of buildings. At least one later architect took the suggestion seriously. The Quaker Square Inn in Akron, Ohio, occupies the shell of a former elevator. If you're in town for the night, you can rent a round room in one of the silos.

    Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
    • architecture
    • modernism
    • modularity
    • building
    • farming
  • What Le Corbusier got right about office space

    An Article by Tim Harford
    timharford.com

    In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished.

    Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives.

    ...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not.

    • work
    • personality
    • ownership
    • modularity
    • choice
  • The joy of the humble brick

    An Article by Tim Harford
    timharford.com

    The brick is one of those old technologies, like the wheel or paper, that seem to be basically unimprovable. ‘The shapes and sizes of bricks do not differ greatly wherever they are made,’ writes Edward Dobson in the fourteenth edition of his Rudimentary Treatise on the Manufacture of Bricks and Tiles. There’s a simple reason for the size: it has to fit in a human hand. As for the shape, building is much more straightforward if the width is half the length.

    1. ​​I am here​​
    2. ​​What the material wants to be​​
    3. ​​What the brick really wants.​​
    • material
    • building
    • modularity
    • geometry

See also:
  1. architecture
  2. building
  3. modernism
  4. farming
  5. nature
  6. making
  7. details
  8. material
  9. geometry
  10. work
  11. personality
  12. ownership
  13. choice
  1. Christopher Alexander
  2. Tim Harford
  3. Brian Hayes
  4. Ellen Lupton
  5. J. Abbott Miller