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Last Chance to View Architecture Chair Karen Fairbanks' Latest Project at MoMA
10.16.08
New York, NY -Monday, October 20, is the last day to view Flatform, the latest project of Karen Fairbanks, chair of the architecture department at Barnard and Columbia, and her husband, Scott Marble, adjunct professor of architecture at Columbia, at the Museum of Modern Art’s acclaimed exhibit: Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. This latest offering from the MoMA capitalizes on the growing popularity of prefab houses, or buildings whose components are manufactured off-site and erected on a designated plot of land. Today, more than half the homes in America are built using prefab materials and Home Delivery provides a glimpse of what prefabricated homes might be made out of and what they might look like in the future.
The exhibit, which opened this summer, consists of five new contemporary, prefabricated homes on view in the vacant lot next to the Museum on 53rd Street as well as 84 architectural projects inside the museum, including photographs, architectural models, original drawings and blueprints, wall fragments and partial reconstructions spanning 180 years of prefabrication home design.
According to the exhibit’s curators, Home Delivery illustrates how the prefabricated house has been, and continues to be, not only a reflection on the house as a replicable object of design, but also a critical agent in the discourse of sustainability, architectural invention, and new material and formal research.
“The exhibit shows the wide range of ways people are practicing pre-fabrication in housing today, and how they may be doing so in the future,” said Fairbanks. “It also does a great job documenting the history of prefabrication, I particularly love the photos and the old design sketches,” she added. While Fairbanks admires the older renditions of prefabrication architecture, her own design in the show has a distinctly modern look.
Marble and Fairbanks, who run an award-winning design and architectural firm, were commissioned last year, along with two other architectural firms, to create a wall fragment using a modern prefabrication architecture technique. They built Flatform, a modular panel system, using digital fabrication, which is a tool that uses three-dimensional software and specialized equipment known as “Computer Numerically Controlled machines” to design and generate prototypes, like a wall fragment.
“We’ve been using digital fabrication for quite awhile now and used it for Flatform because we were interested in the idea of a material that is flat originally but could become more three-dimensional using digital fabrication,” said Fairbanks. “The nice thing about this process is that we tested everything on a computer model first to see what it would look like before it was produced at the manufacturer,” she continued. “We wanted to work with stainless steel, which we had used before. The challenging part of the project was making the pieces connect without using fasteners of any kind.”
In order to create a wall fragment without nails or screws to hold it together, which is a typical feature of prefabricated homes, the design team created a proliferation of holes and tabs on the two sheets of steel using a digitally programmed laser that allowed the pieces to connect and gave the wall fragment its modern look.
Flatform is prominantly displayed at the opening of the sixth floor gallery section of the exhibit and was recently mentioned in a review of Home Design by New York magazine. The author praised Flatform as an “alluring metal sculpture” and compared the digitally created design pattern to that of snowflakes.
This is the third time that Marble Fairbanks, the couple’s award-winning firm, has exhibited at the MoMA. Eight years ago, they received an international design award for creating a set of ticket booths at the site of the old location of the museum. In 1992, the firm was among the top finalists in an international global design contest held in Nara, Japan, by city officials searching for an architect to build a new convention and performance hall. The firm’s drawings that were entered in the contest were displayed in the MoMA that year, and remain part of the museum’s permanent collection.
A team of teachers and builders
Besides teaching at Columbia, the couple is also responsible for several of the rooms and buildings on its campus, including a slide library built for the department of Art and Archeology, the Altschul Auditorium located in the School of International and Public Affairs, and the new student center and café building in the Graduate School of Journalism.
But Columbia isn’t the only educational institution benefiting from their talent: Marble Fairbanks has designed for schools such as Cooper Union and the Fashion Institute of Technology, and they are currently working on designing the regional offices for New York University's Abu Dhabi campus in the United Arab Emirates. In addition to the firm’s numerous university projects, Marble Fairbanks has created public libraries, private homes, and community centers in America and abroad.
But despite all of her exciting work in the field, Fairbanks still makes time to teach at Barnard this semester. Was a trip to the MoMA on the class schedule? “It wasn’t a class assignment, but I hope my students had time to see the show,” she said. “It really is a wonderful exhibit.”
— Maya Dollarhide |
