Tag Archives: Modularity

This prefabricated steel residence is built from a single Quonset hut to find community through modularity

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The Caterpillar is a 192-foot-long, 46-foot-wide modular residence designed and built from a Quonset hut that features a compact and inhabitable cube in the center of each unit for services such as a bathroom, shower, and kitchen.

In the United States, Quonset huts were introduced in the years following World War I. Based on the earlier Nissen hut, another type of prefabricated steel structure designed by the United Kingdom for military use, Quonset huts were designated for primary use by the U.S. Navy. Chosen for its lightweight profile, the Quonset Hut is an all-purpose building that can be shipped anywhere and assembled without skilled labor.

Today, in Detroit’s Core City neighborhood, real estate development company Prince Concepts, teamed with architect Ishtiaq Rafiuddin and landscape architect Julie Bargmann to turn the Quonset hut into a 9,000sf sculpture with six residences and two live-and-work spaces.

Following True North, the neighborhood’s first live-and-work communal space, the team of architects and developers hoped to merge that same sense of community into a single Quonset hut. Dividing the lengthy residential complex into eight units, each live-and-work space features 23-foot tall ceilings that are lined with clerestory windows and a ‘Jetsons’ style genesis chamber where residents can “transform from ‘just barely awake’ to ‘ready for action,’” as the architects describe.

Constructed from unstained, polished wood, the genesis chamber is positioned neatly in the center of each unit and brings a railroad-style flow to each unit. Separating the bedroom from the kitchen and dining area, the genesis chamber contains all the services available to each unit, including the bathroom, shower, and kitchen. From the kitchen, residents pass through the bathroom to get to the main bedroom and vice versa.

Finding inspiration everywhere from music notes on a piece of sheet music to a UFO crash landing in the forest, the team of architects behind Caterpillar set out to create a type of communal sanctuary in Core City’s urban woodland, where over 150 trees call home.

Caterpillar homes in on porch culture to outfit its exterior with the same sense of openness that floods the inside of each residential unit. From windows to doors, Caterpillar features 36 different openings that bring in pools of natural light indoors during the day and emanate a golden glow from the outside come dark.

Designers: Undecorated, Studio Detroit, Prince Concepts, D.I.R.T. Studio, and SteelMaster

The inhabitable center cube outfits the home with services such as a bathroom, shower, and kitchen. 

The curved walls evoke a similar open layout seen in spiritual dome buildings. 

Designed in railroad style, the genesis chamber divides the home into two different living areas. 

The bathroom takes on a minimalist personality to blend with the unit’s open layout.

Skylights and clerestory windows bring in pools of natural light throughout each unit. 

Each unit is split into its own half-circle splice with 36 different openings lining the facades of Caterpillar. 

The post This prefabricated steel residence is built from a single Quonset hut to find community through modularity first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Faraday Future semi-truck concept makes autonomous vehicles more responsible, communicative, and modular.

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Designed and visualized by Daniel Pokorný (with the video above by Darek Zahálka), the Faraday Future semi-truck presents a pretty novel direction for autonomous vehicles in general. The semi-truck comes with a set of hardware as well as AI upgrades that allow it to be a force to reckon with. Powered by artificial intelligence, the trucks have level-5 autonomy, requiring no humans to drive/control/regulate the vehicle when it’s on the roads. However, in Pokorný’s world, the vehicle isn’t just smart enough to drive on its own, it’s smart enough to communicate with people/vehicles on the road too.

Perhaps the most eye-catching part of the Faraday Future semi-truck is its front panel which features a dynamic display that lights up either with Faraday Future’s logo, or can transform into signs, PSAs, advertisements. The front panel also allows the semi-truck to communicate with people around it, letting them know of the truck’s intentions, whether it’s slowing down, making a turn, etc.

That versatile display on the front really gives the Faraday Future semi a wide range of capabilities, that are further enabled by the truck’s ability to operate autonomously. Capable of doing much more than just lifting and transporting cargo, the truck can help aid the city’s public utilities by rerouting traffic, displaying messages, traveling to specific locations with special cargo (like an ambulance or a fire-truck), and providing services for private companies like logistics as well as advertising.

The truck’s AI works as a hive-mind too, allowing multiple trucks to cooperate together for better efficiency. While this ability easily allows multiple trucks to communicate with and work alongside each other on a container yard or a loading bay, it also allows trucks to collaborate by forming a chain-link of multiple trucks, with one truck leading the way and the others behind following like carriages. A pretty unique feature for autonomous vehicles, it gives the vehicles modularity, allowing them to effectively expand their storage, just by lining up additional trucks behind one other. It also helps dramatically reduce drag, allowing subsequent trucks to travel with much lower energy consumption, making transportation of cargo much more energy efficient.

Needless to say, Pokorný’s views on transportation and autonomy are pretty interesting. Rather than having a vehicle that’s a one-trick pony, Pokorný leverages the power of AI to give one truck a versatile set of use-cases… beyond just transporting goods. While the Faraday Future semi-truck is currently just a fan-made concept, it does present an extremely interesting and diverse future for cities, citizens, businesses, and for the automotive industry!

Designer: Daniel Pokorný

With 12 different configurations possible, this modular bedside table will fit anywhere you like!

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The most dynamic pieces of furniture are typically the pieces that offer more than meets the eye. The chair that doubles as a storage bin and work desk, the lamp that transforms into a clock radio, or air purifiers that also work as bookshelves. There are some designs that attempt to totally transform a product’s use through modularity, but then some other designs whose aim is to provide several different uses for the same product through the breakdown and reconstruction of its modular components. Such is the case for NÓMADA, a modular, multi-purpose bedside table.

The team behind NÓMADA decided to attain the bedside table’s modularity through the material used during its production process by carving and integrating notches, buttons, and twisted, narrow chutes into each wooden and steel panel used for construction. It’s a good thing too because tools can be tricky to store in smaller living spaces like apartments or studios. The end result makes up a bedside table that appears simple and whose purpose seems singular upon first glance, but when deconstructed, the possibilities for restructuring NÓMADA are laid out in front of you, all you have to do is mix-and-match as your tabular needs guide you. Even if you just want a subtle revamp or facelift for your apartment’s design, simply unscrew and see which pieces fit where! NÓMADA comes with four main components: four table legs with adjustable lengths, a steel storage area with a matte finish, and a classic wooden drawer with the same stain as the legs. The compatible color scheme and sleek structure of NÓMADA also help to move the reconstruction process along smoothly. By simply unscrewing the table’s legs from the steel storage area and removing the drawer feature, users can configure the side table in any way that works best for them and their living space. An elevated desk tray can be detached and function on its own, while the table maintains its core purpose or the height of the table’s legs can be adjusted in order to either shorten the table’s height or give it some length to reach higher bedsides.

NÓMADA is capable of producing twelve different configurations so that it can adapt to any of your needs or living spaces. Coated in neutral tones and comprising a minimalist end design, NÓMADA not only morphs into new structures with the ease of a screw but also offers a breadth of both cohesiveness and simplicity to your personal interior-design taste with its sleek, elegant color scheme and lean frame.

Designers: Marta Adamska, Marco Santos, Gabriela Nogueira

Motorola’s latest mod is a high-speed 5G modem!

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It’s great to see Motorola going strong with its modular ecosystem. The Moto Z is truly a landmark moment in Motorola’s history of creating smartphones and should definitely go down in its hall of fame along with the Razr, Aura, and the FlipOut, for just being daring enough to go against the tide and do something refreshingly different, a trait we really miss in today’s bandwagon market.

The 5G Moto Mod comes from a collaborative effort between Verizon, Qualcomm and Motorola. A slim device that snaps to the back of your Moto Z3, the 5G mod is literally a modem that gives your phone low-latency, high-speed internet, taking over the current cellular connectivity of your phone to give it a dramatical boost by helping it tap into the carrier’s 5G network.

Touted as the network of the future, 5G is all set to revolutionize the way we interact with internet-connected devices. Devices using 5G can send over large amounts of data at much faster speeds, allowing for more connected experiences as the number of IoT devices increase in our lives and begin ‘talking to each other’. 5G is also going to boost the adoption of AR and VR in our daily lives, allowing phones to generate and receive large amounts of content and data. While currently still in its developmental stages, the 5G network should be mainstream by the next year, and the Moto 5G Mod wants to be one of the first few products to ride that wave, providing an unparalleled experience to its users.

The Moto Mod is currently only compatible with Verizon’s 5G network, with the ability to support data transfer at speeds as high as 5Gbps (which is five times faster than the fastest LTE connection today). Of course, with high data transfer speeds also comes significant battery drain, which is why the mod also packs a 2,000mAh battery inside it, providing your phone with the additional juice it needs. Given that the 5G network only works with data, the phone will still use its primary cellular connection for calls, relying on 5G just for internet connectivity.

All set to debut in early 2019, the Moto 5G Mod is one more great product in Motorola’s modularity eco-system. From a projector, to a smartspeaker, to even a polaroid printer, Moto Z’s modularity program is one of the most interesting things happening in the smartphone industry today. Keep up the good work, Motorola!

Designer: Verizon, Qualcomm and Motorola

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