Utopian House Follies
(before?)
(after?)
Two articles today about lightweight, prototypical houses with a utopian bent, one from the East Coast (
The New York Times > Home & Garden > Out of Africa, a House Fit for a Kit Bag) about Prouve's long-lost Maison Tropicale, and one from the West Coast (
LA Times > Design genius at play) about
Gregg Fleishman's allegedly up-and-coming mathematical clusters. I thought it was cartoonishly funny how the story from NY swells in admiration at the modern archaelogy and neglected genius of Jean Prouve while the story from LA can't wait to take famous architects down a peg ("In the sometimes puffed-up world of architecture, where 'genius' is an overused word, Fleishman is the real deal.") They're both annoying to read, but I gotta say, that Prouve house-in-a-suitcase is freakin cool.
Here's the backstory on Maison Tropicale:
In 1949, Mr. Prouve and Henri Prouve, his brother, won a competition staged by the French government under De Gaulle to design inexpensive housing and administrative buildings for France's African colonies.
Their Maison Tropicale could be broken down as a kit of parts, packed snugly onto a cargo plane and flown to the outposts of the country's dwindling post-World War II empire.
The house sat four feet off the ground, resting on 15 concrete posts. The walls were made of a series of sheet-metal panels that slide into different positions on overhead tracks to adjust to weather and season. Each panel was perforated with 27 portholes, some of which are filled with panes of blue-tinted glass to reduce the glare of the equatorial sun. The house is surrounded by a narrow terrace made of planks of African hardwood.
Mr. Prouve also developed an ingenious system for natural cooling. Air was drawn up through openings, and it circulated through the house and then vented through an elongated chimney that ran like a spine the length of the roof. The outer skin of sheet metal reflected the heat, while three tiers of ridged aluminum louvers could be angled to block the sun as it moved across the sky.
And here's what Mr. Fleishman's up to:
Using no tools other than his hands, architect and furniture designer Gregg Fleishman needs only 29 minutes to transform 101 puzzle-like pieces of Finland birch into one of his Cluster Structures, probably the most sophisticated playhouse ever devised...
Although he has yet to apply his design principles to a full-scale building, Fleishman is a rarity in the commercial enterprise of architecture. A theoretician with a social conscience, he creates designs that are a blueprint for prefabricated, low-cost housing, which looks more utopian than utilitarian. "My goal is to create affordable housing worldwide," Fleishman declares.
Fleishman explains his design in the closest approximation of lay language he can muster. The Cluster, he says, is an arrangement of solid wood panels joined at the corners to create open spaces "like a 3-D checkerboard." Each module can be repeated and joined together infinitely, hence the term Cluster, which provides customizing options limited only by one's imagination.
...as you read more and more about his ideas, you realize he's more crackpot than genius, unfortunately. He acknowledges that his buildings won't be any more affordable than typical new construction, and that it takes a particularly gifted person to put his DIY kits together. Oh, and has anyone noticed that these structures are a little nutty-looking?
* Ray, 7/01/2004 07:32:27 PM
