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Romantic nomads

North America was originally inhabited by nomads who made efficient use of local materi - als in situ .The romantic notion to a natural nomadic state of existence is a recurring theme in western culture. From Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Robert Frank’s photographs to the road film directed to mass culture; from Frank’s Candy Mountain to Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho , the land and the road are the sites of North American dwelling.

Marie-Paule Macdonald

Heironymus Bosch, [1450-1516] Garden of Earthly Delights, detail

a poet from the Russian revolutionary period,Velimir Khlebnikov, described a vision of transparent portable dwellings — The idea is this: a container of molded glass, a mobile dwelling-module supplied with a door, with attach- ment couplings, mounted on wheels, with its inhabit- ant inside it. It is set on a train, or on a steamship, and inside, without ever leaving it, its inhabitant would travel to his destination.

title synthesised the pleasurable connotations of popsicle, bicycle and cushion. A primal living space, it was portable and inflatable, accom - modating one or perhaps two intimately associated individuals housed within a membrane whose central element consisted of a high-tech chaise longue, like the banana-style dentists’ chair, equipped with the requisite appliances. The se radical projects critiqued consumerism. A film by Jacques Doil - lon, L’An 0 , proposed a vision of society ‘after the revolution’ whose inauguration was celebrated by a shower or rain of keys — the key being a quintessential symbol of property which must be continuously administered, inventoried and guarded. In Doillon’s film the citizens spontaneously throw their keys out the window and roam through western civilisation’s cityscapes. Futuristic, sci-fi scenarios proposed by visionaries of the 1960s — the plastic bubbles and high-tech gear — are familiar to the popular consciousness, having been completely absorbed into a recycled-pop visual vocabulary. William Gibson has remarked, “Well,Technology ‘R’ Us, at this point. What I find alarming when I’m doing interviews is people who say,‘Technology, Bill. Good or bad?’ as though we could put it back in the box! We’re such fabulously artificial creatures that we live four or five times longer than we do in the wild. I’m always amazed that anyone could say [noting that it’s the most technological of people who ask most often]...‘Can we not go back to nature?’ Well I guess you can, but you won’t like it.” 4 The fascination for instant architecture was provoked by a desire for immediate gratification.The cartoon-like images are still powerful. Did these gadgets work? What were the fastenings and connections, were they zippers? super adhesive? Velcro, which was already in garments in 1961? Since these projects were drawn up, advances in technologies in polymers and the plastics industry have been so numerous that little of the technological literature on plastics from 1965 is relevant today. The issue of disposability has metamorphosed into recyclability. The fordist model of continuous accumulation that prevailed in mid-century faces the problem of finding a place to throw away to. Ecological issues have returned with great force, as the consequences destroying the finite resources of the planet have become more obvious. Reassessing Plastic Plastic is both familiar and an index of the new. In the last twenty years plastic — polymers and composites — have dominated new materials. The Plastic Era began in 1979 when more plastic than steel was produced in the world. Petroleum-derived, plastics come from a finite resource without necessarily being natural or ecological materials. We have filled up the landscape and landfills with plastic products, detritus that is often unbiodegradable. Flotsam and jetsam washes onto our shores that will remain litter forever. In South Africa, the plastic grocery bag is jokingly called the national flower. The growing plastics industry has made this material supremely ubiquitous. Sylvia Katz

Just as a tree in winter lives in anticipation of leaves or needles, so these frame-work-buildings, these grill- works full of empty spaces, spread their arms like steel junipers and awaited their glass occupants. Every city in the land, wherever a proprietor may decide to move in his glass cubicle, was required to offer a location in one of these framework-buildings for the mobile dwelling-module ( the glass hut). (1920-21) 1

Khlebikov proposed dwelling units ‘identical throughout the entire country’ 2 . He saw bridge-buildings, underwater-palaces, steamship-build- ings, filament-buildings, single rooms connected in a single strand field- buildings. The ‘poplar-tree building’ was ‘a narrow tower sheathed from top to bottom by rings of glass cubicles.There was an elevator in the tower, and each sun-space had its own private access to the interior shaft, which resembled an enormous bell tower 700-1400 feet high.The top of the building served as a landing platform. 3 Khlebniknov lived a nomadic life during the housing crisis of the revolution, roaming from emergency shelters to cots in shared quarters arranged by friends. Projects from the 1960’s proposed mobile dwellings as escape. During the ‘anti-architecture’ wave, designers mixed technological gadgetry with revolution. Superstudio, Coop Himmelblau, Archigram and Hans Hollein proposed environments pared down to a minimal capsule. Hollein pro- posed the Enviro-Pill , a pill that would alter one’s environment. Michael Webb’s Cushicle and Suitaloon , seminal ‘personal enclosures’ are proto- types for this contradictory condition of the individual in capitalist society divested of all but a minimum survival kit of commodities. The Cushicle was an intimately scaled translucent capsule, a free form chamber, a pre-engineered, customised micro-environment. Its sensuous

1 Velimir Khlebnikov, ‘Ourselves and Our Buildings, II, Remedies from the yet-to-be-city of the Futurians’, Let- ters and Theoretical Writings . transl. Paul Schmidt, ed. Charlotte Douglas, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1987, p 350-1 2 ibid., p 351 3 ibid., p 353 4 William Gibson interviewed in Eye magazine , Toronto weekly, Sept. 9, 1993, p. 11

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I ssue 10 2003

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