Kitted Out

I've always been entranced by kits. As a kid, I had a science kit full of little vials and electronic bits, all of which were gradually swallowed by couch cushions and carpet seams. Legos, the gateway drug to my architectural lifestyle, are the apex of modular, reconfigurable toys. I also had Construx, now defunct, which used plastic bubbles and bars to make assemblages. Erector Sets, K'NEX, and Froebel Blocks are all part of the same genre, attempting to fracture the ultimate geometry of the world into a set of discrete, elemental pieces.

Now, I find myself investigating the erector sets of the adult world. A recent article on Design Observer laid out the history and rationale of my old nemesis, container architecture. The author ties it into a larger history of capsule and modular architecture, linking Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House to the modern shipping container iterations of Lo-Tek, Shigeru Ban, and MRDV. This push towards rationalization, modularity, and a set of common dimensions has created a whole class of "standard" industrial objects: shipping containers, dimensional lumber, concrete masonry units, Jersey barriers, oil drums, tires, etc. 

Kitted out. Always be knolling . . .

Open Source Ecology

A couple of days ago, I caught a story on NPR about Open Source Ecology, an initiative begun by a young astrophysicist, Marcin Jakuboski.  As he explains in his TED Talk, he found himself, at the end of his twenties, book-smart and real-world useless.  Searching for something more tangible to do with his life, he tried to go back to the land, becoming a farmer in rural Missouri.  He found his plans stymied again by unreliable machinery.  As he tells it, Marcin was then inspired to build his own tractor, using a "simple X, Y, Z geometry" and an interchangeable, de-mountable hydraulic power plant.  

The LifeTrac, the first project in the Global Village Construction Set.

This led to a wiki, which led to global collaboration, which spiraled into a project that hopes to open-source fifty industrial machines essential to humanity.  Jakuboski calls it a "civilization starter kit."  As the idea snowballed, he became a TED fellow and has now turned his property, the Factor E Farm, into a laboratory for prototyping these machines.  As of this fall, employees and volunteers are hard at work building an compacted earth-brick and strawbale lab and dormitory where designers, engineers, and builders will live and work on the GVCS.  The structures on the farm are being built with the GVCS brick press, the soil pulverizer, and the LifeTrac tractor, directly testing prototypes as they are created.  

The Global Village Construction Set, via Wikipedia.