THE AGE OF NEW NOMADISM

By Jennifer Siegal

The information age whets our appetite for the exploration of the unknown. As inquisitive social beings and natural explorers of the universe, we are standing at a new threshold of curiosity and movement. We are poised for more than sharing ideas over vast distances; we are ready physically to actualize these explorations. Biological and technological advancements reveal themselves in our everyday lives, echoing prophesies and environmental visions from American pulp science fiction. Architecture today rolls, flows, inflates, breathes, expands, multiplies, and contracts, finally hoisting itself up, as Archigram predicted in the early 1960s, to go in search of its next user.

While architecture's purpose remains constant - providing shelter from the natural elements and community among its inhabitants - mobile and portable structures herald the dawn of the age of new nomadism. The applications and uses are limitless; these buildings have no borders. Their material palette, design style, and transportation method are diverse. Mobile architecture, then, "can be defined not merely in terms of movable structures, but rather as a way of intelligently inhabiting a specific environment at a specific time and place in a way that better reacts to increasingly frequent social shifts."……..

EVOLUTION OF A MOBILE TYPOLOGY
Historic examples of mobile architecture describe a preindustrial world not bound to place but possessed by an ideology of itinerant and nomadic responses to permanence. According to biblical history, over four thousand years ago Noah was called by God to build an ark capable of transporting the natural world and its creatures to safety when the apocalypse struck. This may have been the first portable and relocatable structures whose purpose was self - sufficient housing.

Nomadic cultures moved about for varied reasons: locating migrant food sources, adapting to changing climatic conditions, trading goods, finding communal protection, and searching for the unknown. Of these regionally disparate cultures, many shared similar challenges in their need to provide shelters that were durable, lightweight, flexible and ultimately transportable by low - tech means. Examples of uniquely formed tensile structures made from taut skins on supporting structures are found in the American Indian tipi, the Mongolian yurt, the Bedouin woven goat - hair "blacktent", and the Basque sheepherder tent/coat.

Not all portable structures evolved, however, out of the strict necessities of survival. As every society matures, cultural and ideological themes are expressed and relayed through public performance, art and storytelling (often dramatized today on the Internet). In the medieval Italy mystery plays, performed as populist parables drawn from biblical stories, were staged in demountable theaters called "mansiones". These platforms or booths were set up in the town marketplace or sometimes in an existing building.

Exhibitions and expositions have served as architectural petri dishes for cultivating new design ideas. Perhaps because of their temporary nature, greater risks are ventured and the wildest of dreams legitimized as genuine contributions to the furthering of building technology. In an effort to be perceived as technologically advanced, countries will display (and financially support) the otherwise unimaginable, giving shape to the hypothetical metropolis of the future. With the Great Exhibition of 1851, Great Britain provided an international forum for the display of manufacturing and industry, much like the present - day World Exposition. It was here that the way was forged for a new type of mobile building material. Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, built in six months during 1850-51, exploited the properties of cast-iron. The structure set a precedent for using a component system in building manufacture and site assembly and established itself on the forefront of lightweight, demountable building systems. Unlike its predecessors, "every item of the buildings construction was meticulously planned for reuse in the new structure, even the temporary timber fencing was reused as floorboards inside". The system was successful in its innate logic and economy, which allowed for rapid assembly and reassembly, and could be erected in locations remote from its manufacture. The extent to which the Crystal Palace succeeded in revolutionizing the building industry or engendered a new way of building is debatable; its novelty, however is indisputable……..

ECONOMY OF MOVEMENT: FORM FOLLOWS NECESSITY
Mobile housing was a fertile playground for both practitioners and theorists throughout the twentieth century. In 1920 Le Corbusier wrote about a French aircraft manufacturer that could easily convert its hangars to build mobile houses in Model T assembly - line fashion. Le Corbusier stated in L' Esprit Nouveau that it was "impossible to wait on the slow collaborations of the successive effort of excavation, mason, carpenter, joiner, tiler, plumber... ... Houses must go up all of a piece, made by machine tools in a factory, assembled as Ford assembles cars, on moving conveyer belts."

In 1937 Jean Prouve began designing demountable structures. Having previously examined prefabricated structural systems, moveable partition walls, kiosks, rolling doors and skylights, and furniture on wheels, the J. Prouve Workshops fabricated the prototype B.L.P.S. (Beaudouin, Lods, Prouve, Strasburg) demountable house in steel, unveiled at the sixth Exposition de l' Habitation in the Salon des Arts Menager in January 1939. With two built - in beds, a drop- leaf table, kitchen, storage, shower and toilet, it promised the inhabitant comfortable holiday accommodations…….

PNEU WORLD
Representing the end product of architectural ideologies promoting emancipation through industrialization, the inflatable environment, with its optimistic form and fragile monumentality, has provided radical architects with a new platform. As Mark Fisher recounts, the students of pneumatic design in England and France initially drew inspiration from Frei Otto's 1957-60 work, particularly his soap-bubble experiments and water - filled cylindrical membranes. The British engineer Frederic William Lanchester patented the first pneumatic structure in 1917, and Water W. Bird initiated the American development called "radomes" in 1955; the students of the sixties embarked upon their own theoretical and built versions of these earlier ideas.

By the 1967 Paris Biennial, Jean Aubert, Jean - Paul Jungmann, and Antoine Stinco debuted Pneumatic Living - Economical - Mobile. In 1968, their group Utopie (whose thinking and name, like the Situationists, derives from Henri Lefebvre), were completing their end - of - studies diploma project at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts when they found themselves exhausted by the industrial myth and constraint of prefabrication of building elements. Making real the theories of Lefebvre - "the need for play, spontaneity, the realization of desires and calls, the desire to rescue utopian imagination from science fiction, to invest all of technology into daily life", and to bring about "daring gestures" and "structures of echatment" - they began research into pneumatic structures, "Allowing for a greater degree of spiritualization of the machine long sought by the avant-garde, a sort of communion in aerophagia between surrealism and the functionalist philosophy of doing the most with the least, inflatable would figure as the lightweight and elating supplement to the group's theoretical oeuvre." Their belief was that, "Unlike conventional architecture, which stands rigidly to attention and deteriorates (like a guardsman with moths in thebusby), inflatables (and tents, to a lesser extent) move and are so nearly living and breathing that it is no surprise that they have to be fed (with amps, if not oats). All architecture has to mediate between an outer and an inner environment in some way, but if you can sense a rigid structure actually doing it (dripping sounds, tiles flying off, windows rattling), it usually means a malfunction. …….

UTOPIA, MOTOPIA, AND THE CITY OF THE FUTURE
Antonio Sant' Elia proclaimed in 1914, "We no longer believe in the monumental, the heavy and static, and have enriched our sensibilities with a taste for lightness, transience, and practicality. We must invent and remake the Futurist city like an immense assembly yard, dynamic in every part; the Futurist house like a giant machine." Part of the "generation of electricity," Sant'Elia's drawings of the Citta Futurista (1913-15) and the sketches for Power - Stations (1914) suggest an architecture of "diagonal and elliptical lines" and a firm belief that "architecture such as this breeds no permanence, [and] no structural habits." This leads us to Sant'Ellia's conclusion that "we shall live longer than our houses, and every generation will have to make its own city".

Throughout the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first, visionary architects have responded to Sant'Elia's Futurist claims. Paolo Soleri began his utopian vision in the Arizona desert and embarked on his journey of making his own city with a creation of Arcosanti in 1970. Designing according to the concept of arcology (architecture + ecology), Soleri stated that "Shifting Populations [will be] the norm in the future: The human species is on the move. When Asia and Africa follow suit, even at the exclusion of forcible shifts) political, economical, cultural, and racial), millions of people will expect shelter and services in the most likely and unlikely places. A prelude to the plunge into space, and Hilton Hotels are not where the answers will be."

Another visionary, Rem Koolhaas, reshuffles our notions of the city and permanence, writing. "The Genenric City is always founded by people on the move, poised to move on. This explains the insubstantiality of their foundations.like the flakes that are suddenly formed in a clear liquid by joining two chemical substances, eventually to accumulate in an uncertain heap on the bottom, the collision or confluence of two migrations - Cuban emigres going north and Jewish retirees going south, for instance, both ultimately on their way someplace else - establishes, out of the blue, a settlement. …..