Sunday, June 08, 2008

The Comeback Cube

Apartment Therapy has a nice roundup of the shedlike prefab designs on offer at the recent Dwell on Design conference. Regular readers of Shedworking will be familiar with the likes of EcoShack's Nomadic yurt and the KitHaus featured there as well as Gregg Fleishman whose Comeback Cube looks particularly appealing.

Fleishman has a decades-long interest in modular building systems and the exhibition featured a full size single cube module in 3/4 inch European Birch, measuring 9 ft by 9 ft by 9 ft with an 81 square foot rooftop deck, with a waterproof resin coating. He says the single cube is permit exempt therefore ideal for shedworking. Here's what he says about this lovely work:
"In architecture today, the green movement focuses mostly on the origins of material and use of energy. This work proposes that there is another way to be green in architecture, a way that focuses on process in building going beyond the factory. It is in geometry, with its repeating similar forms, and smaller similar parts that we find the advantages we are looking for. These include greater structural efficiency, manufacturing economies, easier handling, less specialized work force, and lower start up costs. What distinguishes this geometry from Fuller's is that it excludes the pentagon, instead focusing generally on the cube and the octagon, more specifically variations of a 3D checkerboard of cubes or "rhombicubes". When oriented in different ways, these cubes have provided for a veritable bouquet of new and different building types to sprout up using faceted geometrical faces that can provide a new and more natural look and feel to our buildings."

4 comments:

  1. What an original website! Thanks for all the info.
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  2. Anonymous7:56 PM

    ELECTRIFYING!!!

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  3. Anonymous6:56 AM

    this is such an inspiring site :) keep up the good work :)

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  4. The comments on Apartment Therapy are worth a browse. All of them focus on a key issue -- prefab affordability. No one has yet realized the promised cost advantages of this approach. Where is the Henry Ford of prefab?

    A shed is the perfect laboratory to work on this problem. It is a microcosm of a somewhat larger structure suitable for living, but is simple and inexpensive (I know, I know, this is relative) enough for realistic experimentation. I would love to see a Shedworking "expose" of this issue.

    Warm Regards.....Bill Kratz

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