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    <title>MoMA Home Delivery - RSS Updates</title>
    <link>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/</link>
    <description>This exhibition offers the most thorough examination of both the historical and contemporary significance of factory-produced architectures to date. With increasing concern about issues such as sustainability and the swelling global population, prefabrication has again taken center stage as a prime solution to a host of pressing needs. The prefabricated structure has long served as a central precept in the history of modern architecture, and it continues to spur innovative manufacturing and imaginative design. The relationship between the drawing board and the finished product has never been more dynamic, but the potential of prefabrication has not yet come to full fruition. The exhibition will examine this phenomenon through historical documents, full-scale reassemblies, and films that trace the roots of prefabrication in the work of architects including Frank Lloyd Wright, Jean Prouve, and Richard Rogers, corporations such as Lustron, and the imaginative systems of other influential figures, including Thomas Edison and R. Buckminster Fuller.</description>
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    <pubDate>Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:22:05 GMT</pubDate>
    <docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>
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      <title>MoMA - Hand Over: Pleine Air Prefabrication/Transition Thoughts</title>
      <link>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/275</link>
      <guid>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/275</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[ This is the final blog entry of an exhibition about process, in both its content and its form. The exhibition is, by its very title, about the process of making architecture in the new conditions of the digital age, with aspirations for future factory production guided by mass customization, new digital techniques, and the brimming energy and creativity in today’s architectural climate that are triggered by developing streamlined relations between designing and fabricating. But it is also about the process of making an architecture exhibition, which in a sense began three and half months ago when this online journal was launched along with the fabrication of the houses. Indeed this exhibition about process is divided into two almost equal, temporal parts—the three and half months of the online existence, construction, and curatorial assembly and the three and a half months of public viewing of three-dimensional architecture in situ.

The exhibition has been an enormous challenge for a vast variety of teams, from the architects’ teams working on MoMA’s west lot, to our exhibition designers and installers in the galleries, to the filmmaker, Joey Forsyte, who spearheaded the research and production of the film loops seen in the galleries, to our catalogue editors who worked with a book that documents things to come as well as things that are, to the wonderful team who designed this Web site as an integral part of the extended reach of the exhibition. A partial list of thanks appears at the bottom of this last contribution from the curatorial team.
  
An exhibition is a process, and an exhibition on architecture requires continual innovation, thinking, and experimenting. We will be as interested in the debates that we hope the exhibition stimulates as we are in the research undertaken to get this far. We especially look forward to the panel discussions with the architects of the five full-scale commissions, scheduled for October 15, 2008, to assess what we have learned from this grand ambitious experiment: both for the future of prefabrication and digital fabrication, and for exhibiting architecture to make new ideas accessible to the broadest possible public. Certainly the architects and assembly crews have learned much, not all of it quite as anticipated, as the hopes of prefabricated design, factory assembly, and just in time (not always) delivery have shown. We look forward to this discussion and hope you can join us.  

In closing, I thought to offer a more general sense of why I wanted to take on this topic at this scale only eighteen months after arriving at MoMA in January 2007. The escalating popularity of architectural exhibitions demands that a new generation of architectural curators innovate in the format and techniques of display, as well as in the selection of themes that go beyond the mere celebration of the spectacular imagery of recent “Starchitect” projects. What is needed is not only to engage current production critically, but also to confront issues of consequence in a way that is engaged, and engaging for general and professional audiences alike. With the dual audiences of practitioners and lay public in the architecture galleries of museums, as opposed to more professionally focused architecture centers or schools, the challenge is to exhibit not simply the results but the very processes and the larger stakes—creative, social, economic, even ethical—of architectural practices in a world that demands radical change.    

Returning to the tradition of commissioning 1:1 scale exhibition houses more associated with building fairs than with museums, the curatorial team, in selecting five architecture firms, set out to present prefabricated houses out of doors to recapture the dual popular and professional appeal of model buildings in the long history of experimental building exhibitions. Home Delivery is in certain measure an homage to the most popular displays in MoMA’s 75-year history of architectural exhibitions—the Houses in the Museum Garden of 1949–1955. At the same time, unlike that series, which turned its back on the most advanced fabricating experiments of the post-War period, this set of prefabricated exhibition houses seeks to advance current research into new materials and applications of digital fabrication to create diverse housing types from vacation homes to replacement houses for populations at risk, notably in a house designed for use in New Orleans. The exhibition might be said to have been born of two opportunities: one, the wealth of positions in current discourses on fabrication that have rapidly redrawn the lines between architectural creativity and manufacturing innovation; and two, the unique availability of a large-scale vacant site in midtown Manhattan. Unlike many exhibitions that seek to exhibit only a panorama of a single tendency, it was the curatorial intent to bring together practitioners operating in divergent milieux, both that they might be forced into dialogue (at the very least in the exhibition) and that they may explore their place in a larger historical spectrum of alliances between design and production, which have often characterized the most fruitful moments in the history of architectural modernism for over a century. The announcement shortly after my arrival at MoMA in January 2007 that the Trustees were close to concluding a deal with developer Gerald Hines to sell the vacant lot spanning the midtown block between West 53rd and West 54th Streets—immediately to the west of the Museum—made the moment more than ripe, and the exhibition became unwittingly a chance to test prefabrication’s claims to accelerating the process of construction by staging processes traditionally sequential as simultaneous and separate undertakings, notably site preparation and building assembly.  

This gritty urban lot (quite different from the outdoor gallery setting of the sculpture garden used by Marcel Breuer and Gregory Ain in 1949 and 1950, respectively) has made possible the display of full-scale prototypes of recent or new prefabricated housing types—types both for urban and suburban use. With the explosion of research into digital fabrication at all scales, notably at several architectural schools which feature prominently in the commissions (MIT, Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania), the moment is ripe for creating opportunities to scale up that research to the prototyping of entire buildings or components of building systems, therefore adding program to the exploding research in parametric design. The five houses, chosen for their immediate realizability, are juxtaposed with three newly commissioned experiments in digital fabrication, the walls deployed on the sixth floor that begin the process of peeling back to revisit the history of modernism and prefabrication. These are integral parts of the gallery exhibition, juxtaposed with historical fragments of prefabricated structures by Jean Prouvé and of the American Lustron House system, from the late 1940s, as well as numerous other designs that constitute a survey of the history of modern architecture’s fascination with developing a replicable house design from the horizons of industrial production. 

For Peter Christensen, Curatorial Assistant, and I, the continuities and the differences of earlier prefabrication efforts (too readily relegated to a stereotyped failure at mass standardization) are valuable contexts for understanding both the precedents and the new stakes for factory produced architecture in a period of direct communication between a designer’s software and the machinery of fabrication. Much of the greatest promise for unleashing the potential of the research into digital fabrication, beyond the sheer abundance of possibilities often explored for their own sake in architectural school settings, comes from sets of new conditions in the world of global manufacturing that have profound parallels with earlier moments of rapid change in industrial techniques and their consequent discrepancies between different parts of the globe. Larry Sass’s Digitally Fabricated Housing for New Orleans, for instance, exploits a difference in centers of technology for design and centers of handwork for assembly that can as easily be applied between Cambridge, Massachusetts and New Orleans, for instance, as between Bangalore and rural India or between Beijing and rural China. By underscoring the untapped potential for prefabrication nascent or implicit in several of the full-scale projects, Home Delivery sets out to deliver more than simply brilliantly conceived and styled new additions to the growing popularity of prefabrication in the niche market of neo-modernism.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
      <title>MICRO COMPACT HOME - micro compact home at MoMA: Enjoy your visit!</title>
      <link>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/263</link>
      <guid>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/263</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[ As I write this the micro compact home has been installed on the site at MoMA and took no more than two hours to complete installation. By the time you read this the m-ch will have been there for about one week.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
      <title>DIGITALLY FABRICATED HOUSING FOR NEW ORLEANS - THE FINAL DAYS</title>
      <link>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/274</link>
      <guid>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/274</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[ PROJECT STATUS
Day 18 today and we are almost finished with the house. All that is left are the doors, crescent at the roof, and the model. We are very happy with the design and cannot wait to hear what others say.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
      <title>SYSTEM3 - EPILOGUE II</title>
      <link>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/272</link>
      <guid>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/272</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[ In this last entry I would like to present the small exhibition inside of the SYSTEM3 prototype. As mentioned last week, we have installed three monitors which explain the SYSTEM3 house. Since the shown prototype is the minimum version, it is important for us to show the system’s further possibilities and options.

The first screen will document the building process. You will see how the house is constructed, from the factory in Austria to MoMA’s West Lot. This includes images of the CNC-cutting of the timber, the production of the Serving Unit, the transportation, and the assembly in New York.

The second screen will show a detailed explanation of SYSTEM3. This includes animated graphics about the concept, the parts, and the design, and features several SYSTEM3 variations: dwellings, a hotel, and an office tower.

The third screen is about the usage of SYSTEM3. You can see how the prototype shown at MoMA can be expanded and transformed: A person could buy the SYSTEM3 prototype and over the years, with a family and an increasing need for space (and an increasing financial budget), the house could grow with its user. In the end, the 570 square foot minimal variation could become a three-story luxury villa with four bedrooms, four baths, three spacious decks, and over 1,700 square feet.

We look forward to seeing you at the exhibition and thank you very much for your interest in this blog and in our work.

We would like to thank again all our partners and supporters:
<a href="http://www.coelan.com" target="_blank">COELAN</a>
<a href="http://www.fhe.at" target="_blank">FHE Franke</a>
<a href="http://www.gaggenau.com" target="_blank">Gaggenau</a>
<a href="http://www.getzner.com" target="_blank">Getzner</a>
<a href="http://www.glasmarte.at" target="_blank">Glas Marte</a>
<a href="http://www.haemmerle-spez.at" target="_blank">Hämmerle Spezialtransporte</a>
<a href="http://www.klh.at" target="_blank">KLH</a>
<a href="http://www.vorarlberg.at" target="_blank">Land Vorarlberg</a>
<a href="http://www.raiba-bmb.at" target="_blank">Raiffeisenbank BMB</a>
<a href="http://www.zumtobel.at" target="_blank">Zumtobel Lighting</a>]]></description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400 GMT</pubDate>
    </item>
        <item>
      <title>BURST*008 - Looking for Closure</title>
      <link>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/271</link>
      <guid>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/271</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[ The BURST*008 team has been on site longer than that any of the teams from the other houses in the show. That's because the house functions not as a ready made—it could never be delivered whole to a site—but as a new type of prefabricated building system. It might be more accurate to call BURST*008 a kit home, but even that's not a complete description.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400 GMT</pubDate>
    </item>
        <item>
      <title>CELLOPHANE HOUSE - Completion of Cellophane House</title>
      <link>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/269</link>
      <guid>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/269</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[ 26. DID THE HOUSE GO TOGETHER AS EXPECTED?

In general, the entire frame and chunks went together as planned, in less than one week. Final fit-out is to be completed this week and includes interior wall panels for NextGen SmartWrap™, interior partitions, glazing, kitchen cabinetry, all in time for a top to bottom cleaning prior to the opening.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400 GMT</pubDate>
    </item>
        <item>
      <title>MoMA - Almost there...</title>
      <link>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/270</link>
      <guid>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/270</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[ We are nearing closer and closer to the opening. Activity on the site is at its zenith and energy and excitement is high. On Monday we began installing the interior component of the exhibition, carefully unpacking myriad architectural models, drawings, and ephemera. As we unpack them we have to make sure that they have arrived safely through the careful condition checking of our Registrar Corey Wyckoff. Our team of six fearless art handlers carefully measure out handling and placement and ensure all movement of the works is done with the utmost care. 

The arrival of the micro compact home was exhilarating, watching the composition of the five houses finally take hold. Next week we hope to share numerous behind the scenes pictures with you in anticipation of the public opening on July 20th. 

We are also pleased to introduce another guest entry today from Scott Marble and Karen Fairbanks of Marble Fairbanks, in which they discuss the process behind their wall commission, one of the four we discussed in an earlier post.

- Barry & Peter]]></description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 05 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
      <title>MICRO COMPACT HOME - Proportions and the Number 26</title>
      <link>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/258</link>
      <guid>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/258</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[ This is the 13th entry I have submitted and as it happens, the numbers 2.6, 13, 26, and 52 have recurred many times as an interesting and repeating theme in our work at the London office and at our institute at TU Munich.

The micro compact home is a 2.6 meter cube; actually it is 2.65 meters, but in the initial design phase we aimed for 2.6 meters for clarity and simplicity. The dimension is important as it is acceptable for transport throughout all European countries.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
      <title>DIGITALLY FABRICATED HOUSING FOR NEW ORLEANS - LAYER BY LAYER</title>
      <link>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/267</link>
      <guid>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/267</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[ <b>Project Status</b>
We are almost finished with the main structure (gray parts). After that, we will assemble the details and ornamentation—similar to the model. 

If there is anything we have learned through the day by day process, it is: “Do not miss a panel on the way up.” At times we would leave out panels and add panels above or below without reason. That would come back to haunt us because if there is a panel above, installing the panels below were almost impossible. The pressure from the panel above made insertion of a panel difficult. For example, the clear section was left out of the house for a number of days, and so inserting the panels took hours instead of minutes (Figure 1).]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
      <title>SYSTEM3 - EPILOGUE I</title>
      <link>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/268</link>
      <guid>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/268</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[ The SYSTEM3 prototype house is ready for your visit. 

Our assembly crew is back to Austria, the great people on site from FJ Sciame and Budco are working on the other projects and everybody from MoMA is working hard in the last two weeks before the exhibition opens.

For me, there is some free space to explain what you can expect when you visit the show:

The house is 53 square meters, which is around 570 square feet, and is fully equipped with a kitchen, bath, and lighting. It has a staircase to access the roof, which can serve to connect floors in the case of a vertical expansion of the units. Since the staircases (as the installation shafts) are always located at the same fixed position, you can easily stack the Serving Units.

In addition, we will show some specially designed furniture: a table, a chair, and a bed. This furniture’s design is also based on the idea of prefabrication. To be honest, we love this furniture so much we would happily do another exhibition with it…

Finally we will show on three monitors animated graphics, film, and explanations about SYSTEM3.

Next week I will describe in detail what we are going to present on these screens...]]></description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400 GMT</pubDate>
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      <title>BURST*008 - Coming soon to an exhibition near you: Wall*s</title>
      <link>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/266</link>
      <guid>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/266</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[ In the new Pixar movie Wall*e, a little trashbot, left alone on earth, trundles about smooshing trash into cubes and building skyscrapers with it. It’s apt the movie should have come out this week, because over at BURST* we’re building out of plywood, which is essentially smashed and pulverized wood made into a building material. Plus, this week, we are making walls so we’re getting a little wall-y.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
      <title>CELLOPHANE HOUSE - Stacking</title>
      <link>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/264</link>
      <guid>http://www.momahomedelivery.org/index.php/posts/264</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[ 26. WHAT IS HAPPENING ON SITE?
 
All of the chunks have been delivered to the west lot and are currently being assembled on-site. As of today the house has been built up to the third story with delivery of the fourth and fifth floors continuing. The last chunks to arrive were the roof and canopy, which include <a href="http://www.cpidaylighting.com" target="_blank">Danpalon skylight panels</a>, installed by Sky King Skylights. The infill line at <a href="http://www.kullman.com" target="_blank">Kullman</a> was cleared in less than one week.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400 GMT</pubDate>
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