Word: modularized
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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...
...scene of most of the carnage, it no longer officially exists. Workmen gutted the area and then sealed the entryway with a wall and two rows of blue lockers. For the moment, until parents and school officials decide what to do, books and tables have been moved into four modular rooms alongside the school...
...what do car assemblers actually make these days? "Car assemblers have cornered the market on chassis platforms, and no modular provider wants to start making those, at least not in Europe," says Jurgen Kruschwitz, head of SMH Automotive. "Outside engineering consultants like Lotus may play a larger part in certain functional situations, but the car companies know how to protect their own design and competence...
...slouch at sequencing either. In Saarlouis, Germany, Ford representatives show off a 3,000-foot-long ski-lift contraption that feeds 58,000 sequenced components daily into the company's assembly flow, replacing 3 million miles' worth of truck travel over the course of the year. The modular scheme will enable the company to offer the same diversity of car models on just 16 different chassis by next year, down from 32 platforms in 1998, as part of an overall plan to trim yearly costs $1 billion worldwide...