It’s back! A proper high quality reissue of Ken Isaac’s rare 1974 book How To Build Your Own Living Structures! With original copies changing hands for several hundred quid a time, this essential, inspiring and practical book is now available for all.
Ken Isaacs (1927-2016) was an American designer and architect, known for his creation of a matrix-based modular system to build living structures. Isaac's Living Structures are handmade, multifunctional furniture and architectural units that challenge ideas of how users could sit, work, and live within their own homes and in the broader built environment. Isaacs radically deconstructed conventional notions of modernism, devoting his career to reimagining furniture as a system that “adjusted to people rather than people to it.”
The book is a manual for creating various small modular structures around the smart space-saving concept of the "matrix", and also practical furniture and storage solutions, the book also provides an opportunity to immerse oneself in the philosophy of this pioneering architect, whose thinking resonates strongly with our own times where many of us face housing, space and storage problems.
The new edition of the book is now accompanied by an essay from Susan Snodgrass, critic and teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago, who recontextualizes this emblematic work of the 1970s.
A classic, which needs to be on your handmade DIY bookcase!