CategoriesDesign Concepts and Techniques
Modular Design
Design built from standard units that can be combined, extended and rearranged, in furniture, buildings and systems.
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About
A module is a standard unit that repeats. Traditional Japanese houses have long been planned around the tatami mat, so rooms are sized in mats. Modernists made the idea industrial: in 1923 Walter Gropius proposed housing assembled from a kit of standard volumes, and after the war modular furniture let owners build what they needed. Charles and Ray Eames's Storage Units (1950) combined steel frames with coloured panels, Fritz Haller's USM system of chrome tubes and ball joints followed in the 1960s, and Dieter Rams's 620 Chair Programme (1962) could grow from armchair to sofa.
The idea reached architecture at scale in Moshe Safdie's stacked concrete boxes for Habitat 67 in Montreal and Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo (1972). Contemporary studios such as Aranda\Lasch build furniture from repeating geometric cells. Look at the connections, since the joint decides how freely a system can change.