Lo-fi Over the winter of 1996-7, visual artist Steve Topping built an encamp- ment near Cartier in northern Ontario. He travelled by riding the rails: finding a freight train headed in the right direction and climbing on as it left.While hopping freight trains requires extremely light luggage,Topping packed enough material to assemble a winter shelter, adequate for -30 degree weather of northern Ontario, in his backpack and carry-on lug- gage. In addition to food supplies, he brought in the cladding material and tools to build his hut structure when he arrived in Cartier. The forest and a previous encampment provided the branches and a metal flue. The skin of the hut is a sheet of plastic from Western Tarpaulin Com- pany, three layers, a clear woven glass-fibre layer sandwiched between two transparent layers. Topping carried the plastic tarpaulin and aluminum-coated paper, bun- dled and tied around a bow saw, twine, additional building and camping supplies in a backpack, and made a series of voyages into the forest to build his portable encampment. The structures used traditional bent branches bent into arcs and tied, with the plastic on top. The camp was build over a found cylindrical flue which Topping made into a fire container. By placing the heat source at one end of the paraboloid structure and lining the convex ends with reflective metallic-coated kraft paper, the shape focuses heat on each end of the interior. The camp was not only built of materials that could be carried by one person, but once assembled, can be moved in one piece — by two people — to a new site. Topping used the encampment to observe the Hale-Bopp Comet.
In the wake of Khlebnikov’s futurian city, the Mobile Cell project modelled three-dimensional scaled prototypes, realizing a series of portable envi- ronments to be suspended on found surfaces or custom frames.The form that the capsules take were inspired by the ‘soft’ shapes of anti- architecture and by the plastic forms created by post-minimalist sculptor Eva Hesse: a squashed irregular spherical capsule.The pod contained a core and a central structure, like an apple. Another version split into segments, with membranes like an orange.The capsule consisted of a translucid material making up thick composite walls, built up in layers of synthetic sheet, film or textile. Translucent membranes contained magnifying lenses, to allow for more careful observation of small creatures, insects or birds. The pod could be a suspended in soft transparent plastic with doubled or multiple walls, filled with transparent insulating gel, and membranes along which a range of tubes for services and structural blades were threaded for quick assembly or dis-assembly. Other models used cast, extruded, sewn or injection molded plastic to build prototypes. These wearable environments envisioned life on a landscape in a minimal capsule-like portable environment combining the ideas of a living pod, a library capsule, and a pharmaceutical module, all incorporating views, lenses, or ‘concentrate’ so that the natural environ- ment would not be disturbed by the individual who inhabits it.The various-sized capsule or module would include ultra-light wearables with interchangeable elements that provide visual or other information about miniaturised perceptible environments.
Marie-Paule Macdonald teaches architecture in Montreal and at University of Waterloo. Her book,‘rockspaces’ was published by Art Metropole in 2000.
Steve Topping ‘Traversing Shack’ Camp construction, Cartier, Ontario, Canada 1996-7
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