PREFACE to MOBILE: THE ART OF PORTABLE ARCHITECTURE

By Robert Kronenburg

It is our genes to be nomadic. For nearly all the human - kind's history, just to survive he have found it necessary to live our lives on the move. As the enduring protohuman species, Homo sapiens followed a hunter-gatherer existence, shifting "home" from place to place as required by the demands of hunger and climate. This movement was often seasonal and a pattern, but the flexibility and adaptability it engendered in our species also enabled much bigger geographic shifts to take place as environmental change and natural disasters made regions of the earth uninhabitable.

In the last ten thousand years most of us have settled down somewhat, and become used to farmed food delivered to the centers of commerce and industry that have become our cities. However, some groups of people never stopped moving. On every continent there are traditional cultures that have refused to respond to the sometimes extreme pressures to take up a sedentary lifestyle. Without doubt it is their traditions, their culture, their identity that they seek to retain - but it is their mobile buildings that have made it possible for them to keep moving, and to stay connected to their ancestry. As they were in their forebears' time, these buildings are still made by the people who use them, to patterns developed over thousands of generations, and are still able to accommodate the exigencies of life on the move. Such mobile structures are the pattern book that inspired the permanent architectural forms in which most of us now live, and they still hold lessons for contemporary design in their economic, lightweight, flexible approach to providing shelter.

Now it seems that a return to mobile living is imminent for many more of us. In North America, it is a common phenomenon for retired people, released from the burden of a lifetime's work, to sell the house, buy a trailer home, and become "snowbirds". Moving between the fixed homes of their children and grandchildren, they follow the clement weather from north to south in a migratory pattern similar in effect, if not in ethos or style, to that of the native Americans who inhabited this landscape for the thousands of years before the immigrant nation was formed.

The change is being brought about by the information age, which has made it possible for many of us who are still immersed in the world of work to also seek out a mobile life. Within a week of writing this piece I will begin a three - month, round-the-world journey of more than twenty two thousand miles. Though I have some stopping points identified, I have a few other details about these locations and no set itinerary. But with my Apple iBook computer (which weighs less than five pounds) and my Motorola Timeport tri-band mobile phone (just four ounces), I will be able to connect instantly to all the people I work with, obtain data on almost anything I care to find out about, make travel and accommodation arrangements, manage my finances, and buy almost anything and have it waiting for me wherever and whenever I arrive.

That is fine for me, an individual, with my relatively limited needs, making use of the buildings erected for similar travelers. While my physical needs for food and shelter are conventional, however many human activities are not so simple, concerning various sized groups of people often undertaking complex activities - commerce, education, manufacturing, health care, and entertainment, to name just a few.

Now there is an ever - increasing need for these functions to be more flexible and adaptable, in both application and location, than they have never been in the past. To be ultimately flexible and ultimately adaptable these activities must be sheltered by mobile architecture. Are architects and designers ready for this challenge? The answer, it would seem, is yes - because for decades they have been exposed to the potential of the portable environment. In the 1950s , 1960s, and 1970s it was the work of high profile experiments like Buckminster Fuller, Archigram, and the Metabolists. More recently there has been a spate of live projects for real clients with real problems, which have proven that mobile architecture is not just something that is sometimes built in situations where there is simply no other solution. More and more, an enlightened client understands that there is a performance advantage in going mobile compared to the standard, static building solution.

The traditional building forms that have always informed our understanding of the meaning of architecture - to provide shelter, a sense of place, a mirror of cultural and societal endeavors - still inform the new mobile architecture. Tents, lightweight structural frames, and wheeled and floating structures figure in the range of recent projects. However, the possibilities of new technology are also shaping the development of the field. Pneumatic, tensile, and kinetic structures provide the opportunity for new dedicated architectural forms. Smart buildings that respond to both environmental and user demands are now being built, as are self - deploying and - erecting buildings that may remain dormant when not in use or being transported, but that change in form and volume when occupied.