Modular Solution for Social Housing

George Maciunas/Fluxus Foundation is pleased to present “Fluxcity: Prefabricated/Modular Solution for Social Housing”. The exhibition will open as a conceptual web exhibit in June, 2012 and related works will be available to view at the foundation exhibition space in September 2012 at 454 West 19th St, New York. NY 10011.

Sustainability has never been a more pressing need in the state of current socio-economic trends. George Maciunas, who stated “efficiency is giving the most performance for the least cost”, invented the 1900-square-foot prefabricated mass building system known as Fluxhouse as an flexible solution for social housing. Echoing MoMa curator Pedro Gadanho’s famous statement, “curating is the new criticism”, the exhibition will engage the concept of urban sustainability through adaptive design solutions.

Copyrighted in 1965 as an improved design to Soviet Block Housing, Fluxhouse is a modular unit based on a minimum number of components and a simple manufacturing method of fabrication and construction. With simple tooling requirements, the manufacturing process is readily adaptable to existing automation systems. Easily customized to residential, institutional, industrial, and agricultural functions, the Fluxhouse unit can be multiplied to construct buildings of any size and configuration. Naturally eco-friendly, Fluxhouse is resistant to natural disasters including fires, floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes, as well as deterioration caused by rot, termites, corrosion, and discoloration.

Maciunas, who is known as the “Father of SoHo” for gentrifying this neighborhood with artists’ cooperatives, envisioned Fluxcity as an adaptive ‘knowledge-city’ manifesting collective intelligence into the built environment. As the world faces its greatest economic challenges due to poor speculation in property developments and an expanding global population, prefabricated systems like Fluxhouse hold their greatest potential as a cost efficient government sponsored solution used to repair lower and middle class communities and raise the standards of living for the world today.

The commercial applications of Fluxhouse are examined in the newly published “An Assessment Report”. Eric Gould, founder and director of Helicon Design Group, and architects Scott Weinkle and Mauricio Arduz will present experimental 3D digital renderings of Fluxcity. The exhibition space will display images from “Ciphers”, the latest project of Christoph Gielen, whose aerial photographs of isolated suburban settlements reveals the hidden geometries of living environments. The topics of architectural consumerism, cooperative living arrangements, nomadism, and urban morphology will be studied in the scholarly works of Stewart Brand, Nikos Salingaros, Christopher Alexander, Michael Haerdter, and Rosi Brandotti among others.