Word: prefabs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most Japanese: taking someone else's concept (the art factory) and pushing it to new levels of discipline, efficiency and production innovation. Spend time at Murakami's KaiKai Kiki commune and you'll quickly discover that the hippie vibe the place radiates is a front. Looking past the shabby prefab trailers and scrubby farmland they skirt, you see that Murakami is as much a factory floor manager as an artist. Under his direction, computer researchers catalog recurring motifs for easy cut-and-paste reproduction, drafters transform sketches into outlines on canvas with robot-like precision, and technicians keep precisely documented...
...PREFAB (YES, PREFAB...
...problem is that in the past, this process was associated with, well, ugliness. But designers are now putting the fab in prefab. Two books out last year, Pre Fab and the Spanish publication Arquitectura Alternativa, celebrate entirely or partially prefabricated houses around the world. Many architects are adapting some of the systems builders use. Others are more fanciful. Computerized drawing and cutting methods enable designers to create the most uncommon houses they can dream up. And one Austrian designer claims his dwelling, right, can be put together on site in as little as two hours. --By Belinda Luscombe...
...long-distance firm--but also helping bridge the racial and economic divides that continue to plague Mississippi. A transplanted Canadian, Ebbers, 60, teaches Sunday school at his Baptist church each week, serves meals to the homeless at Frank's Famous Biscuits in downtown Jackson, Miss., lives modestly in a prefab home, wears jeans and boots to the office and has poured almost all his once considerable fortune back into his company. Walker says Ebbers "is too committed not to make a comeback...
...taken the ancient wisdom of the original design and incorporated modern technology and fabrics," says Alan Bair, president of Pacific Yurts, a leading manufacturer of prefab yurts. Bair built his first yurt 25 years ago after spotting one in the pages of National Geographic. Over time he improved on tradition with seven-ply reflective insulation, architectural-quality vinyl-laminated fabrics and aircraft-quality tension cables to produce a warm, draft-free, ultra-stable modern superyurt. He now employs more than 20 people full-time supplying yurts to ski resorts, national parks, military bases and thousands of private yurt enthusiasts...