From the archive: Essential Innovation Ken Isaaca

As part of our work Celebration 25. AnniversaryWe reproduce formative magazine stories before our website has been launched. This story has previously appeared in the Drven May 2007 show. Years.

In the early 1950s new married couple in the periodIllinois, found themselves to face completely modern cases: How to find happiness in a cramped study. For a wife, a young design student named Ken Isaacs, the challenge has proven the prophet. He designed a solution in his economy and elegance Life The magazine presented it in 11. October 1954. years, issuance (cover price: 20 cents). In the article entitled “Dom in Cube”, Isaacs and his wife showed that “unusual contraception” were on double and plywood. Once the cubic framework created “its type of two-storey house with alive and dining space, bedroom, studying, (i) space for storage.”

Isaacs called their backup creation of life structure. It was the first of its basic designs – essentially, in appreciated simplicity and disgusted waste. Over a long career involving furniture systems and various minimum apartments, its fascination of spatial interactions made for designs that were almost obsessively compact, but cunning in their versatility floating somewhere between flowIkea Question: Q. Isaacs designed their Supfering Supfer (built-in light), watching TV, eating and sleeping – seat back to bed. His microdorm integrated the bed, a table (also with lighting and electrical places), consignment, dining room and bureau in the floor space of the bed.

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Below is artificial whiz was Isaaca’s desire to help create a better way of life. In the post-war culture, Gdiddils dealt with material consumption and spread, his concern was hit by a chord. “It was the time of optimism,” he recalls. “People were ready and interested in new ways of life.”

His study of anthropology, and in particular classic work of Ruth Benedict Cultural patternsHe convinced that our concepts of culture are subjective and therefore basically arbitrary. “If it is (culture) arbitrarily,” why not break the mold and use aware of the selectivity and sensitivity to restruct it, trying to make a more objective and more harmonious life for myself? ” Moreover, he claimed, a traditional design dealing with partial or fragmented solutions to life needs, while his approach expressed a “matrix idea”, which would “harder in any case towards the construction of the overall environment or matrix.” This approach also used to develop innovative teaching structures at the Academy of CRANBROOK Academy, where he received the magic and later led by the Design Department and the Illinois Institute for Technology and RISD.

Isaacs, like Р. Buckminster FullerHe believed that technological advancement could cross a long way, but not completely, towards mitigating social and environmental problems. Offspring Green designHe proposed alternative lifestyles such as light and nomadism-ideas that basically challenged the growing American Cul-DE-SAC cultures. “Ken was really important in the table in one hundred way,” says Stanley Tigerman, Chicago Architect and former director of the School of Architecture at Illinois University in Chicago. “There is no question of the authority of his work in the development of sustainability.”

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“I was always a builder,” Isaacs says. “I would save my money and bought wood and metal and actually built these projects like living structures. And when you build things, it changes you. Not only don’t comment intellectually on the line.” You don’t really comment on your energy. “

Isaak’s celebrity has reached international levels (and Life He called again) 1962. Years with his invention of the knowledge framework. Created as he taught at the Chicago-earlier design institute New BauhausHe founded Laszlo Moholi-Nava 1937. – The structure of a 12-foot cube had 24 projectors facing internal examinations that shone the spectators who entered in with pictures provided for the walls, floor and ceiling. The intensity of experience and opposites of images called people to see relationships in new ways. Since it could “manifest things that are usually abstract”, believed that Isaacs believed that the knowledge box had huge value as an educational tool.

When the Graham Foundation gave Isaaci architectural grant, moved to Rural Groveland, Illinois and developed a series of light structures called Microhouses. In 1970, he joined the Faculty of School of Architecture at the University of Illinois in Chicago and stayed there while retired in 2000. years.

These days, Isaacs can be found in Indiana, thinking about the second lifelong interest: lighting of light microtrak, which would offer an alternative for most American cars, which Isaacs says Isaac’s average less than three miles.

The microkar synthesizes Isaac search for essential, thankful, but qualified to take technology and its buildings. “I see a small problem with amazing technologies,” he says. “Processes used to develop these new products – Their level of complexity is forbidden. And it doesn’t really last forever. I’m thinking about microgram, but really simple, but it’s really simple.

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