Fanyu Lin, young architect from China, graduate from Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, joins New York Fluxus Foundation on developing an innovative Prefabricated Mass Building System, invented in 1960s by visionary architect and inventor George Maciunas (the founder of Fluxus), and is co-curating the exhibition series FLUXUS AS ARCHITECTURE,” Universal Structure” ,” Fluxhouse Limited Edition”, ”The Chinese Unit” at Fluxus Foundation, 454 W 19th St. New York, NY, 10011.
Fluxus was a global collective of artists, musicians, designers bound by their intermedia sensibility and experimental enlightenment. John Cage, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, George Brecht and Henry Flynt are among the artists who shared George Maciunas’ vision.
George Maciunas was educated in architecture and art history at Cooper Union, Carnegie Institute of Technology, and New York University. While studying the European and Siberian art of migrations in NYU, he published the groundbreaking academic paper Atlas of Prehistoric Chinese art in 1958.
As an architect, he was credited with the invention of a structural framework and received two patents for the prefabricated building system in 1959/1961. His design of Fluxhouse, as an example of the system was completed and copyrighted in 1965. As an urban planner, the New York Times coined Maciunas’ title as the “Father of SoHo” for his Fluxhouse Cooperatives project, which transformed this neighborhood from a post-industrial dystopia into a thriving area for contemporary art since 1960s. In realizing a vision of architecture based on collective ownership, the Fluxhouse Cooperatives may arguably be Maciunas’s most influential and widely practiced Fluxus project.
Fanyu Lin is developing Maciunas’ prefabricated building system, and co-curating the exhibition series FLUXUS AS ARCHITECTUR at Fluxus Foundation. The first exhibition Universal Structure proposed an adaptive urban system of standardization, modularization and mass-production, which contextualizes architecture design and urban development in a complexity of technology, economy and social welfare. The second exhibition Fluxhouse Limited Edition focuses on a single-family housing module of the system. Eco-friendly designed, it is resistant to natural disasters including fires, floods, earthquakes and hurricanes. Consonant with George Maciunas’ view, ‘homemaking is the greatest art’, Fluxhouse is testament to the notion of creating a home and not simply a house. Following the success of the first two exhibitions, now Fanyu Lin is busy with the upcoming third exhibition The Chinese Unit, in which she plans to develop the system in the context of urbanization in China. She is eager to combine the expertise and vision in Maciunas Prefabricated Building System with her own cultural identity from China.
The current exhibition FLUXHOUSE LIMITED EDITION is on display from Jan. 16th – Mar. 22nd, 2014. FLUXUS AS ARCHITECTURE Series is curated by Harry Stendhal, Chairman of Fluxus Foundation, New York, and Fanyu Lin, Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in Columbia University, awarded with Bachelor Degree of Architecture by China Central Academy of Fine Arts.