Innovation and unconventional thinking are both hardwired into Jennifer Siegal’s DNA. This shows in a body of work and research that questions everything, particularly the static, heavy, inflexible architecture that we somehow still expect in a world that is anything but.
In 1998 she named her firm Office of Mobile Design, a nod to her obsession with the transitory. The firm focuses on “portable, demountable, and relocatable structures,” from homes to schools to stores. It also explores prefabrication, taking advantage of industrial processes to create a more efficient and nimble architecture. Wheels are an important part of OMD’s design approach, examining ways that any city environment can be made more usable and more dynamic if it can be hitched-up, towed, pulled, or driven from place to place. Siegal states, “For me, mobility is not about erasing everything that exists, but adding to the infrastructure in a more environmentally sound way — a more intelligent way of inhabiting the landscape — resting lightly on the ground.”
