Born from necessity, BōK Modern was developed in response to a value engineering exercise where custom railing on a multi-family project (the founders were the architects for) was to be replaced with standard pipe railing. The challenge was that the railing was a significant architectural feature of the building’s design concept.

An in-house brainstorming session questioned a) what is it that makes custom railing so expensive? and b) why aren’t there alternative railings currently available?

The fabrication of architectural metalwork has been basically unchanged since the invention of iron. Individual iron elements were forged and then assembled through rivets or ties. The only real advancement since then has been welding, but it is still a labor intensive process of cutting pieces, welding them together and then grinding and filling.

The ‘Eureka’ moment came: ‘What if we took a sheet of flat metal, strategically laser cut it (with virtually an infinite array of patterns), and then folded the structure directly into the panel?’

Through of a lot of design and development we re-introduced the new design to the owner and their contractor. Since the concept required advanced machinery, the metal contractor did not have the necessary equipment in house but found a high tech sheet metal fabricator that did.

By utilizing technologically advanced computer automated equipment and eliminating all welding and grinding, thus greatly reducing the amount of hand labor, we were able to keep the original custom design intent for less than the cost of the proposed pipe railing substitution.

The result: the birth of BōK Modern.