Reader Alec Farmer sent us this brilliant pic of his replica of Ken Isaacs’ 8′ Microhouse. Alec built it himself and is planning to live in it – off grid – for 1 year in Glasgow, Scotland to learn more about micro-architecture and sustainable living.
Thanks and good luck Alec!
I’ve been a fan of Ken Isaacs’ work for decades and it’s great to see more people discovering this pioneer of Post-Industrial and Urban Nomadic design. Isaacs is best known for his invention of the Matrix modular building system -a simple DIY wood framing system used as the basis of what he called Living Structures (what some would call ‘furnitecture’ today) that one could intuitively design, build, and perpetually customize. This was the inspiration for the Box Beam (now called Grid Beam) building system later promoted by the Sun Tools company (once a mainstay of the old Whole Earth Catalog) which became extremely popular for solar energy tinkering in the 1970s, until eventually being supplanted by T-slot framing as solar tech turned pro. If it’s not deemed inappropriate by the mods, there’s a free eBook version of Ken Isaac’s How To Build Your Own Living Structures available at;
http://popupcity.net/2009/07/free-classic-how-to-build-your-own-living-structures-by-ken-isaacs/
This should be a standard addition to every Maker’s library.