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 designed and installed her own prefabricated
storefront office in Venice California, demonstrating her commitment to the
form. This spring the Prefab was deployed to its newest location, the desert of
Joshua Tree, exemplifying the underlying principle in Siegal’s work, mobility.
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”.