Previous Exhibition
Sponsors
Mahalo to our sponsors who helped make this exhibition possible:
Generation Mobile: the Death of Distance
Jennifer Siegal
Competition for New Community Architecture Juror
Date
Thursday, April 8, 2010
6:00 – 7:30pm
Location
University of Hawaii, Manoa
SoArchitecture Auditorium
Founder and Principal, Office of Mobile Design (OMD) (Los Angeles)
Jennifer Siegal, founder of the Los Angeles-based firm Office of Mobile Design (OMD), has chosen as her preferred design medium manufactured housing. Beginning with single-family homes, she has now designed and installed her own prefabricated storefront office in Venice California, demonstrating her commitment to the form. She is also recasting that late-20th century icon of public indifference to quality education, the portable classroom, in a positive light using inventive site strategies to create campus-like quadrangles of smartly designed prefabricated buildings. Drawing on her fascination with new materials, Siegal is constantly experimenting with new ways of making her units sustainable–”for me, the future lies in stronger, lighter, smarter materials.” In each case, the logics of industrial construction—convenience to appropriate workforces, quality control, the efficient use of materials—combine with the logic of minimal site impact to create more sustainable and surprisingly rich architectural projects. Most recently she worked with students at Taliesin West to design and build the award-winning Mod.Fab a prefabricated off-the-grid home located on the desert terrain.
Jennifer Siegal holds a Master’s of Architecture from SCI-Arc, was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University, and was the inaugural Julius Schulman Institute Fellow at Woodbury University in CA. She is the author of Mobile: the Art of Portable Architecture, More Mobile: Portable Architecture for Today, and was the founding editor of Materials Monthly. A monograph on Jennifer Siegal was published in 2005. The winner of the inaugural 2009 USA Network “Character Approved Award” she is celebrated as “leading innovators shaping American culture”.
