From the Archive: The Essential Innovations of Ken Isaacs

As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s May 2007 issue.

In the early-1950s, a newly married couple in Peoria, Illinois, found themselves confronting a thoroughly modern predicament: how to find happiness in a cramped studio apartment. For the husband, a young design student named Ken Isaacs, the challenge proved prophetic. He engineered a solution so surprising in its economy and elegance that Life magazine featured it in the October 11, 1954, issue (cover price: 20 cents). In an article entitled “Home in a Cube,” Isaacs and his wife were shown fashioning an “odd contraption” out of two-by-twos and plywood panels. Once assembled, the cubic frame created “a kind of two-story house with living and dining quarters, bedroom, study, [and] storage space.”

Isaacs called his spare creation a Living Structure. It was the first of his essential designs—essential in that he prized simplicity and abhorred waste. Over a long career that included furniture systems and a variety of minimal dwellings, his fascination with spatial interactions made for designs that were almost obsessively compact but cunning in their versatility—hovering somewhere between proto-Ikea and James Bond’s Q. Isaacs designed his Superchair for reading (a lamp was built in), watching TV, eating, and sleeping—the seat back reclined into a bed. His Microdorm integrated a bed, desk (also with lighting and electrical outlets), bookshelves, dining table, and bureau into the floor space of a cot. 

Beneath the gee-whiz artfulness was Isaacs’s desire to help create a better way of life. In a postwar culture giddily engaged in material consumption and expansion, his concerns nevertheless struck a chord. “It was a time of optimism,” he recalls. “People were ready for and interested in new ways of life.”

His study of anthropology, and in particular Ruth Benedict’s classic work Patterns of Culture, had convinced him that our notions of culture are subjective and therefore essentially arbitrary. “If [culture] is arbitrary,” he concluded, “why shouldn’t we break the mold and use conscious selectivity and sensitivity to restructure it, attempting to make a more objective and harmonious life for ourselves?” Moreover, he argued, traditional design dealt in partial or fragmented solutions to life’s needs, whereas his approach expressed the “Matrix Idea,” which would “strive in each case toward construction of the total environment—or matrix—that integrates all functions of the unit at hand.” He also used this approach to develop innovative teaching structures at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he received his MA and later headed the design department, and at the Illinois Institute of Technology and RISD.

Isaacs, like R. Buckminster Fuller, believed that technological advances could go a long way, but not all the way, toward alleviating social and environmental problems. A progenitor of green design, he proposed lifestyle alternatives such as light-living and nomadism—ideas that fundamentally challenged the burgeoning American cul-de-sac culture. “Ken was really important in a hundred ways,” says Stanley Tigerman, the Chicago architect and former director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “There’s no question about the authority of his work in the development of sustainability.”

“I was always a builder,” Isaacs says. “I would save my money and buy lumber and metal and actually build these projects like the Living Structures. And when you build things, it changes you. You’re not just commenting intellectually on something, you’re actually putting your energy on the line.”

Isaacs’s celebrity reached international levels (and Life came calling again) in 1962 with his invention of the Knowledge Box. Created while he was teaching at the Institute of Design in Chicago—formerly the New Bauhaus, founded by László Moholy-Nagy in 1937—the 12-foot cube structure had 24 inward-facing projectors that blitzed viewers standing inside with images projected onto the walls, floor, and ceiling. The intensity of the experience and juxtapositions of the images prompted people to see relationships in new ways. Because it could “manifest things that are usually abstract,” Isaacs believed the Knowledge Box had tremendous value as an educational tool.

When the Graham Foundation gave Isaacs an architectural grant, he moved to rural Groveland, Illinois, and developed a series of light structures that he called Microhouses. In 1970, he joined the faculty of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago and remained there until retiring in 2000.

These days Isaacs can be found in Indiana, pondering another lifelong interest: the design of a lightweight, electric-powered Microcar that would offer an alternative for the majority of American automobile trips, which Isaacs says average less than three miles.

The Microcar synthesizes Isaacs’s quest for the essential, his appreciative but qualified take on technology, and his building instincts. “I see a slight problem with incredible technologies,” he says. “The processes that are used to develop these new products—their level of complexity is absolutely forbidding. And you know, nothing lasts forever; eventually everything has to be worked on. In thinking about the Microcar, I wanted something that was not simple-minded but truly simple. Like if something went wrong with it, you could just kick it and it would start.”