Enriched Sensibilities Towards Lightness, Transience and Practicality

PHILOSOPHY
By designing non-permanently sited structures that move across and rest lightly upon the land, OMD is rethinking and re-establishing methods of building that contrast the generic clutter that increasingly crowds the landscape. Inspired by Sant'Elia's Futurist manifesto, OMD shares the philosophy that "we no longer believe in the monumental, the heavy and static, and have enriched our sensibilities with a taste for lightness, transience and practicality." This desire for the "active, mobile, and everywhere dynamic" that provoked the Italian Futuristic machine aesthetic, infuses OMD's work. Like machines in a metropolis, however, OMD's built projects bring innovative community-based progra ms to their users. Vision melds with a desire for user-based, program inspired machines accessible through their mobility.

"Owning your own home is the American dream, but for many it's a compromised dream when the only affordable choice is a trailer. Rethinking the mobile home is Jennifer Siegal's dream. Designing compact, flexible environments comes naturally to Siegal. It's part of her family tradition. Her grandfather had a hot dog cart business; two generations later she did too. So for Siegal, her deployable ZEVO Kiosk was more a logical step than a leap. Originally designed as a bicycle-driven locksmith shop, Siegal has turned it into a bookmobile for the National Design Triennial. Reconfigured and renamed as "Storehouse", the winged vehicle serves to as an exhibition display for Siegal's models and a bookstall dedicated to publications on mobile design, including her own book Mobile: The Art of Portable Architecture. Like the portable library, much of the work of Siegal's Office of Mobile Design, has an educational objective. The Mobile Eco Lab and the Portable Construction Training Center are community-based projects that are important, fully-realized precedents for Siegal's ambition to come to terms with prefabricated housing. With manufactured housing one of the largest growing industries in the U.S., her prototype "Portable House" offers a critical alternative that simultaneously attacks the stereotypes associated with mobile housing and the poverty of form that afflicts it. Siegal's proposed iMobile proves that sometimes a room is more useful than a house. A roving computer lab designed to bring cyberspace to the neighborhood the old fashioned way--on wheels--the iMobile is a direct response to the ever-widening technology gulf between the haves and have-nots. "Direct" is the operative word. A proponent of design-build architecture, Siegal is in synch with a grass roots, do-it-yourself momentum building among designers across the country who are looking for ways to inject the personal into the social."

-Susan Yelavich, Co-Curator, 2003 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Triennial

BIOGRAPHY
Jennifer Siegal is known for her work in creating the mobile home of the 21st century. She is founder and principal of the Los Angeles-based firm Office of Mobile Design (OMD), which focuses on designing "non-permanently sited structures that move across and rest lightly upon the land."

Ms. Siegal earned a master’s degree from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in 1994, and was a 2003 Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s School of Design where she explored the use of intelligent, kinetic, and lightweight materials. Ms. Siegal's innovative mobile structures include customized, prefab, green Modernist homes; the Mobile EcoLab used to teach students about the environment; and the Portable Construction Training Center created for the Venice Community Housing Corporation. OMD has recently launched a modern-modular product home line called Take Home™.

Ms. Siegal’s work was exhibited at the prestigious Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum’s 2003 National Design Triennial: Inside Design Now; the Walker Art Center’s Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life; and the 2006 NY Mobile Living Exhibition. Her innovative design sensibilities and expertise in futuristic concepts, prefab and green building technologies were recognized by the popular media in 2003 when Esquire magazine named her one of the “Best and Brightest” and the Architectural League of New York included her in the acclaimed Emerging Voices program. In 2006 Fast Company magazine profiled her in “Masters of Design”. Her work has been televised on CNN, HGTV, broadcast on NPR ‘My Fellow Americans’, featured in many recent books and published in Architectural Record, Domus, Dwell, Esquire, ID, Interior Design, LA Times, Lotus, Metropolitan Home, Newsweek, New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Time, Vanity Fair, and Wallpaper.

Ms. Siegal is the inaugural Julius Shulman Institute Fellow at Woodbury University in Los Angeles, the editor of the book Mobile: the Art of Portable Architecture, and Series Editor of the hands-on magazine Materials Monthly.