Wow, MRP made things magazine. Way more exciting than the fast company blog.

Speaking of honored, I found out from Tyler that my final project at Rice made it into Everything Must Move. I should get me a copy.

It’s been a rough month for modern prefab. MKD is down, and shockingly Empyrean closed their doors as well. Both of these companies made a great product and it’s kind of a shock (especially Empyrean, they were one of the first and biggest prefabricators, and broke a lot of new ground over the years).

Christopher Hawthorne over at the LA Times wrote this great article that should be required reading for anyone asking questions about the future of this industry. Sober, incisive, and maybe just a little pessimistic.

I also came across this modular marketing blog this morning. I expected it to be all bluster and invective, but instead I found a very down-to-earth, helpful, and frequently insightful boots-on-the-ground report. For anyone who thinks that prefabrication is dead, look at this site– it might not be in Dwell for a while, but there are plenty of people doing good work.

This site also turned me onto the fact that Clayton Homes is entering the sustainable modern market. How on earth did I miss that? It’s a solidly MOR approach, as should be expected for any company that actually wants to make money with their product, but I found a lot to like about the i-house (despite a terrible, terrible name). I was actually brought up short by what these guys came up with. It now seems to me that perhaps the real lasting effect of the last 10 years of modern prefab experimentation was to alert the giants of the industry that this niche market was important and growing. Clayton expects this line to bring in 10% of their revenue!

Granted, it’s no Muji home (dear god I am jealous of those Japanese), and Clayton doesn’t have quite the populist modern cache of Ikea, but I think the i-house might be a bellweather for the future of this industry.

So my last post was September 16. Coincidentally, Katy went into labor that week and somehow I never got around to regular blogging again. Well, it’s time to come back. The first five months or so I had a pretty good excuse. But since then Amalgamated Baby & Baby has been going to bed at seven and sleeping through the night, and I have no infants left to take the blame. I’m going to fight back against the evils of RSS feeds and online Netflix, and attempt to reintroduce myself in some way back into adult society, even if through a digital proxy.

Here’s the first chestnut I have to lob into space (warning, bore alert):

How much longer until systems engineering becomes a necessary part of multinational architecture? If the last decade of architecture has made much headway (and I have my doubts) it’s in attempting to rationalize and codify the value of design. What is baffling to me is that this has been done more successfully by people designing cars and cellphones. Architects seem to have been stuck re-hashing the same arguments, with slightly varying terminology, for roughly the last eighty years. Or at least the last twenty five.

It strikes me as plausible that, when discussing the success of Apple versus the relative obscurity of Norman Foster, the real difference is not in commodity value but rather in systems engineering. The entire idea of coordinating complex material and labor flows, attempting to rationalize a design with a material reality, from the very beginning, is something that architecture hasn’t necessarily caught on to. Architects inevitably get stuck on meta-discussions about cultural relevance, and relegate the space-time stuff someone else’s lap, in the last half of the schedule.

Obviously the problem here is dollars, or yuan, and how and when they’re getting given around to people. “We don’t have time,” we always say, “and our margins are too thin as it is.” Our margins are too thin because most clients consider our work to be at least 50% window dressing. And these considerations are the result of architecture having a poorly explained value, beyond a roof that doesn’t leak and marginal improvements in worker productivity. BMW doesn’t have to explain the value of design to anyone. And, despite what you’re thinking right now, it’s not because people love cars. It’s because BMW has people who love to think, talk, and live automobile design, who talk to other people at bars about things that are not related to automobiles, and then come back and breathe this life into their cars, AND that these designers have an unseverable direct link to a system of engineering and production that is simultaneous and nearly instantaneous. Oh, and Everyone. Is. On. The. Same. Team.

Boy, that would be nice.

One of the more surreal experiences I had in high school was a ski trip with a friend’s youth group in Colorado. After a day on the slopes I was treated to a whiplash of, say, a lecture on the evils of macroevolution followed by getting drunk in a hot tub with my fellow brainwashees. There were also harrowing “study groups” that consisted of groups of a half dozen boys (or girls, although they were on another floor altogether), with a single, stone-faced parent, who would quietly and forcefully induce a strange combination of conversation and indoctrination, a process that strangely could be easily be derailed by asking a few questions or changing the subject. It was clear by the second day that the crew-cut head of our group didn’t enjoy his role any more than we were enjoying ours. The whole escapade climaxed on the third day, when he broke down crying, saying “I’ve made some mistakes in my life that I don’t want you boys to have to experience.” This was the only part of the long weekend that I couldn’t roll my eyes at, although I did have a little bit of fun trying to figure out exactly what this transgression might have been. I came away from the whole thing horrified at my taste of evangelism but convinced that it wasn’t nearly as dangerous, insane, or effective as alarmists might make it out to be.

I say this not to establish my fundy cred, but rather as a long introduction to this solitary point: what that poor dad was trying to do in Breckenridge is the diametric opposite of the aim of an average pop musician. His frantic sheltering was being actively countered by the frantic exposure in every song we listened to, endlessly flaying us with heartbreak and regret. What is interesting is that this man clearly experienced something analogous to what you get from your Wonder or your Cobain; these musicians are not only pantomiming heartbreak for the adolescent; they are also fixing and remembering it for the old.

Yes, that’s right. Sanikiluaq. Nunavut. Wikipedia claims this fantastic title belongs to “a small Inuit hamlet located in Hudson Bay, on the Belcher Islands, in the Qikiqtaaluk Region of Nunavut, Canada.”

That’s right. Inuit. Hamlet. The words just keep piling on. Qikiqtaaluk.

It even looks like another planet:

For those of you that think that we Americans own the frontier, think again. There is no location in the continental U.S. that looks as desolate and remote as this place in the center of Canada:

The entire Wiki entry for the Belcher Islands themselves concerns a)Geology and b)Multiple religious Eskimo murder in the 1940’s.

Sanikiluaq. Nunavut.

Bending over to open a cabinet and retrieve dinner for my dog, I noticed the handle to the cabinet door. It’s a nasty bit of overdetailed poorly cast pot metal that is so blurry and undefined that at times I wonder if they’re really there, or just memories of real hardware in some other, more commodious kitchen. They are also just a little bit sticky, but this might just be from Herbie trying to lick his way through the cabinet door.

I grab onto these handles at least twice a day. I remember the feel of them in my hand (lumpy and uncomfortable) and could probably sketch a fair reproduction of one right now if pressed to do it. And yet I cannot for the life of me remember their counterpoints from any other place I have lived. I can’t remember the kitchen hardware in my previous homes in Houston, New York, or San Francisco. I can’t remember the pulls in the place I shared with Katy in Paris, the apartment where I proposed three years ago. I can’t even remember the handles I would grab at my childhood home, at which time they must have been eye-height. All I can do in my memory is graft the current hardware onto the kitchens of years past, a typologically correct but thematically aberrant detail that throws everything else in the remembered scene into question.