![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It automatically limits the nuance of the design to a clunky, inflexible plastic atom. As Barney Main, Lego enthusiast and author of “ Saving Modulex” notes, a component-based system is inherently a flawed idea for a professional modeling set. Indeed, their formulation within the orthogonal era of modernism and brutalism made them more suitable for a brick-based design sensibility than the aerodynamic forms that were to blossom in postmodernism’s conceptual soil. The pieces sprang from a mentality that was rooted in an older, more predictable design worldHowever, they also possessed a certain raw, abstract quality that made them undesirable for use in finished professional models, which is part of why they were generally used by professionals acquainted with design, as opposed to design professionals. They came in a variety of colors commonly used in construction at the time, allowing for realistic, if limited, portrayals of projects. Their scalability made them ideal for constructing city-wide models or intimate surveys of individual projects, like a prefabricated diorama (although they were not compatible with traditional Lego bricks). Because they were relatively easy to assemble and modify, Modulex were great for quickly conveying planning ideas to visitors in an era when a supercomputer was the size of a garage and had the processing power of a calculator. Instead, urban planners and corporations like The Bank of England and General Motors began to use them to construct large-scale models of proposed projects. And yet, they mostly failed to catch on with architects when they were released. Some featured frieze-like detailing on one side and a hollow center to make more nuanced modeling possible sets came with trimmable blocks and model bases. But the Modulex line of bricks, which were based on a 1:1:1 cube (five millimeters on each side) instead of the 10:5:3 ratio that made up every Lego brick, were also detailed and adaptable in a way that ordinary Legos were not. At first glance, they appear to be simple miniatures of their parent block. Spend enough time delving into the YouTube backwaters of specialty modeling materials, and you will undoubtedly discover lengthy tributes to Modulex, a series of precisely they mostly failed to catch on with architects when they were released.dimensioned, scalable plastic bricks launched in 1963 by the owner of Lego, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, in collaboration with industrial designer Jan Trägårdh. A success among urban planners but a failure among architects (with the exception of Eero Saarinen, who used them in his prototype modeling stages), Modulex-the architectural modeling Lego-offshoot-was largely shuttered by the 1980s, almost revived in 2015, and now serves as an XS cult classic in architecture. ![]()
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