Design Ideas: Tiny houses for one

The Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design recently hosted Mark Rios, founding principal at Rios Clementi Hale Studios in Los Angeles. Rios was the first visiting designer in the school’s Creativity Series, founded by MIAD board chair Madeleine Kelly Lubar and her husband, David Lubar.

The program, which will bring a few internationally known designers to Milwaukee each year, seems like a wonderful complement to the Marcus Prize at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. It’s one of the most important architectural prizes in the world, bringing one emerging architect to Milwaukee several times in a year.

There are many great things about these programs. One is the way these professionals respond to our art schools and reflect their culture back to them.

One of the more poignant aspects of Rios’ public talk on Nov. 15 was his description of MIAD’s students.

“The first word I want to use is confidence,” he said, adding that he’d visited art and design schools around the country and the world and found a confidence here that was unique.

 “Somehow the students here have this kind of amazing sense of confidence and self-worth.-.....-They have this kind of, not a cocky confidence, but a really beautiful confidence that comes from being nurtured. There is this curiosity that’s evident from just walking down the halls.”

This had me looking a little closer at what I saw in MIAD’s hallways. One of the things I discovered and was enchanted by were the models made by Bob Lynch’s students for a class called “The Art of Inhabited Space.” Students created one-room houses, solitary, isolated and perched above the ground. They were supposed to function as lanterns in the landscape at night.

Maggie Patnou’s model, like a wedding cake or a tiny stack of crowns suspended in a large dish, created all kinds of play with light. Vanessa’s Sunta’s was a wonderful play of natural forms and Art Deco-like lines with small doors and a great use of the color purple. Cassie Rogala’s model could inspire a great use of a water tower.

These incoming students looked at the home as a medium unto itself. I found their models wonderfully poetic. Each one seemed to tell a story of its own.

Images from top: Detail of a model of a suspended house by Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design student Maggie Patnou. A model of a small, suspended home by MIAD student Amanda Graham.