Nov 25, 2010 Ken Isaacs Living Structures
In the late 1940s a young design student in Chicago named Ken Isaacs was confronted by a serious shelter problem. Needing housing for himself and his new wife as well as enough space to carry out his work but just barely able to afford a tiny two-room city apartment, Isaacs needed a way to get more practical use from limited space. With a leap of imagination that anticipated the Lofting movement that would come some time later, he devised a novel home-made structure of bolt-together wooden parts which organized the one main room of his apartment into a two level set of small stacked spaces of specialized function, exploiting the full volume of the limited room space. This Living Structure, as Isaacs came to call it, combined lounge, office/study, bedroom and storage all into its one cubical frame structure, its furnishings all integrated and made from the same modular bolted-together 2×2 sticks and simple sheets of press-board. It was like a whole home intergated into a single piece of home-made furniture which could be spontaneously adapted to its inhabitants changing needs by simply rearranging its parts. This immediately drew the attention of other designers and was soon featured in a number of magazine article. Intrigued by the versatility of this structure, Isaacs was soon obsessed with adapting the concept to an infinite diversity of uses, evolving it into a standardized system of modular building he called Matrix which anyone could use to build just about anything. Thus was formed one of the key foundations for a brief but remarkable design movement that would eventually be known as the Urban Nomad movement.