Word: modularity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Walk through the nearly completed seven-room house in Studio City, Calif., where 10 contestants will spend 89 days being filmed for edited, same-day broadcasts five nights a week (starting July 5), and you get an idea of what so unsettled some continentals. Built from prefabricated modular units, it is perhaps the least homey-looking house $10 million can buy. The walls are lurid yellow and purple here, dead blue-gray there; the Ikea furniture is spare in the extreme. It is Martha Stewart's hell, a cold Bauhaus panopticon riddled with cameras...
Propst is the guy who, three decades ago, dreamed up these modular boxes for furniture giant Herman Miller. As he envisioned it, the system of wafer-thin, movable walls would be a revolutionary tool that would break down rigid hierarchies, spur creativity and free work spaces from the shackles of uniformity. Unfortunately, he didn't count on the square-foot police. Those FORTUNE 500 facility managers arrested his innovation and reformed it into an impersonal, white-collar assembly line, one that can make a genuine gearhead long for the good, old days of windowless offices and rotary phones...