Hasta La Ideas

François Chambard’s studio, UM Project, is a bright, sunlight workshop located in the industrial end of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The main space is divided between a conference and showroom area upstairs, while downstairs he keeps the most organized, well-kept woodworking shop I’ve ever seen. Tools and materials are not only assigned their own cubby holes, individual drill bits stand upright in a specially made gridded base as if on display. One of the first pieces François shows me is a project he’s working on with a music producer who uses 50-year-old recording equipment in conjunction with brand new engineering for a sound that’s a mix of analogue and digital. Listening to François talk about how his powder-coated steel encasement will house this technology mash-up, I realize that not only is he a skilled craftsman, capable of creating work that is elegant and playful at the same time, he’s also a total tech geek.

In fact, he used to call his style technocraft, but that doesn’t really do justice to the handmade elements of his work. After looking closely at some of the pieces in his collection, like a massive Corian dining table set off by minimal yet oversized bright orange fixtures, I suggest ‘serious play,’ a mix of traditional craftsmanship and new technology with serious attention to fun details. “Playful yet serious,” he muses. “Yes, yes that’s good.”

Origins

After moving to New York from a small village near Compiègne, about fifty miles north of Paris, François worked in consulting until his early 30s, when he enrolled in RISD’s graduate program. “I was sick of doing only conceptual, strategic work and I wanted to do something more hands on, to build things.” But RISD wasn’t the right fit and he dropped out. “Nothing against RISD. I think it’s a great school. It was a wonderful experience, but it wasn’t for me. It was too late in my life stage. I was a little impatient, to be honest, but I was also very clear on what I wanted to do.”

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At first glance it might seem like Jim Garrison is New York’s poster boy for modular housing. Amongst the most recent projects his eponymous firm has completed are the Net Zero for the 99% house, a day care center for Lehman College, homes and townhouses throughout New York state and the award-winning Koby Cottage, a guest house in Michigan that was assembled in 48 hours (you can watch a time-lapse video of the installation). All these projects are modular, aka prefabricated, a dirty word for some architects, but Jim doesn’t shy away from it. In an industry that seems split over what to make of the rise of modularity, Jim is excited about its many advantages, but readily admits that “modular buildings aren’t the solution to everything.”

Prefabricated buildings “only have an advantage in so far as they’re made in a factory under conditions that allow you to make a tighter building that doesn’t lose as much air to the outside and can be more carefully constructed.” But they present just as many problems as they do solutions. For starters, they must be designed to be boxed and shipped in accordance with Federal Highway Administration regulations. This, however, demands that the structures be more robust and able to withstand all the trucking, carting and shipping before they arrive to a site.

I asked Jim whether he found it difficult to work with so many limitations. “I think limitations always make one more creative,” he said. “If you can define the problem in a way that gives it boundaries and something to push against and create within it almost always makes you better.”

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