A MOVEABLE FEAST
We're living more mobile lives than ever. Now a new wave of architecture aims to shake up its roots and move, too.
Murmur the words “mobile lifestyle”, and a slideshow of glamorous images strikes up on auto-pilot: lean, post-dot-com types in airports and rickshaws and riding the rails, swapping international backgrounds like theater sets, enhancing their natural powers via sleek bits of wireless technology. Mobility in the modern era, it seems, spells future-forward and affluence like nothing else.
Of course, every bright glint of “mobility” casts a shadow, too. Globetrotting and time- and space-bending gadgets have democratized remarkably, but not fully. As travel brings us closer to every corner of the world, it also strands us in blandly similar way-stations, wasting record amounts of our time in transit. The global reach of business speeds imports to our doorstep, even as it homogenizes landscapes. If mobile technology frees us from the limits of place, letting us live and work virtually, it also can leave us feeling hollow, placeless, craving real people and locales. Perhaps most critically, our mobility depends on gobs of electricity (to power all those gadgets) and petroleum (to fuel all those planes, cars and conveyances). Clearly mobility has kinks to work out as we march into the future.
Where does architecture - arguably the most rooted branch of design - fit into this moveable feast? In the fast-growing category of “mobile architecture”, buildings pull up stakes and go places; factories assemble custom housing and whisk it to sites ready-made; materials work smarter and harder towards sustainability; temporary structures respond to our mobility more readily, from disaster aid to ad-hoc celebrations; hotels feel more like home; and our collective sense of place, self and society shifts. Welcome to the new, roving landscape of design.
THE FACTORY-BUILT FUTURE
Today’s mobile housing offers more than the thrill of the open road. As real estate values and the likelihood of relocation creep ever-upward, it’s a bonus to take your custom-built, energy-efficient home with you to a new city – or re-sell it, eBay-style, to a market that extends well beyond your neighborhood.
Canadian mobile home manufacturer Sustain (www.sustain.ca) takes a decidedly eco-friendly spin on mobile housing. At a base price of US$107,000, Sustain miniHomes convert handily from wheeled trailer to a rooted, off-the-grid home designed for permanent living. Powered by solar panels, a wind turbine, and propane, miniHome can store 4,800 kilowatts at a peak usage of 1500 kilowatts daily. Hook up your freshwater and wastewater tanks to a municipal source, and you’re literally home free.
Sustain’s genius lies in its factory manufacture, a larger-scale architectural trend made possible – and sensible – by increased mobility. Factory-built prefabs lets architects “think about buildings like a product designer does,” says Jennifer Siegal, principal and founder of Office of Mobile Design, a progressive architecture studio in California. Siegal’s firm designs moveable buildings as well as prefab steel structures, built in factories and shipped to the building site, with remarkably quick turnaround. She considers traditional homebuilding inefficient, more like handicraft than a streamlined production process. “Would Audi’s engineers cobble together their new model in someone’s backyard?” she quips. “On a typical construction site [in the U.S.], 30% of materials get tossed in a dumpster, whereas in a factory 99% of those materials get used or recycled into a new project. Building in a controlled environment had benefits I hadn’t even considered when I got started.” Factory-built homes centralize materials, processes and tools from all over the world, speeding a high-quality, sustainable home to a site – a home that can often be relocated later. Mobility is writ large in every step of the movement.
Efficiencies add up even faster when architects open their minds to a broader palette of construction materials. “A material palette that’s stronger, smarter and more lightweight hasn’t really trickled down to the building industry,” Siegal remarks. “Spacecrafts and even bicycles have made more advances [than construction].” She looks forward to bio-engineered materials that replicate the structural strength of spider webs; in the nearer-term, she opts for materials like Kirei, a recycled waste product of Japanese sorghum grass, and non-VOC paints. Recycled materials can even provide the design “hook”. Architect Adam Kalkin takes advantage of the current over-supply of shipping containers in the U.S., a result of the soaring trade deficit. Kalkin’s Quik House building kit uses shipping containers to build a full-sized home in a single day for US$125-$165 per square foot. (www.quik-build.com)
AD-HOC ARCHITECTURE
Better materials pose a fascinating paradox: their strength and resilience ensure longer-lasting “permanent” buildings, but those same qualities make them endlessly recyclable into new, temporary structures. These new buildings respond more flexibly to our changing mobility, springing up or moving to us as the need arises. Since 1989 Shigeru Ban in Japan (www.shigerubanarchitects.com) has built temporary theaters, churches, even emergency housing from paper tubes treated with paraffin and glue and rooted in concrete or steel bases. Exposure to wind and ultraviolet rays actually increases the tubes’ compressive strength, allowing nearly all the materials to be disassembled and reused. Similarly, UK-based inflate (www.inflate.co.uk) creates re-usable, inflatable structures for temporary use indoors, from their Office in a Bucket pods to events kiosks and retail environments.
Even furniture designers are responding in kind, with designs that respond more swiftly to the changing needs (or floorplans) of their owners. Anders Englund, design manager and co-owner of the Swedish furniture firm OFFECCT (www.offecct.se), puts it this way: “Good modern furniture design should satisfy the ‘moment’, meaning it can be very permanent in one way but you can use it in different ways for the situation.” OFFECCT’s Forest room dividers and the Cloud, an inflatable meeting room, change spaces dramatically with minimal setup. The firm also offers a line of sound-absorbers that block noise while doubling as mobile room dividers. Other designs, like the Flower stool or Woob chair, use ultra-lightweight foam to make re-arranging conversation spaces a snap. For Englund, home and hotels work better when uncluttered and mobile: “I welcome concepts with less furniture that give me more alternatives and space to use them,” he remarks.
WHERE IN THE WORLD IS CARMEN SANTIAGO?
Two Amsterdam hotel projects are taking versions of this fluid philosophy to heart. Lute Suites, a riverside collection of historical buildings north of the city – exuberantly and individually transformed by design darling Marcel Wanders – will soon include “rooms” located throughout the city center but still connected to the hotel. And Paul Rinkens, owner of La Bergère in Maastricht, is planning a revolutionary concept hotel called “Cubicle”. Here the spare, slick rooms will be truly pack-up-and-go modular units.
That such ideas are making headway in the travel industry may be a clear bell ringing the future. Glen Hiemstra, founder of Futurist.com and author of Turning the Future Into Revenue, sees big-time growth in travel on two fronts: retired, affluent baby boomers and the so-called ‘digital native’ generation born after 1981, for whom the Internet, cell phones and frequent travel have always existed. “It’s like a force of nature, this wanting to see more,” he notes. Hiemstra predicts virtual living will only sharpen our keenness for unique places when we travel: even with galloping advances in video conferencing and greater transparency via the web into all corners of the globe, Hiemstra says, “the need for experience will not diminish.”
MOBILITY IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD
Mobile design and architecture, while experienced most fully in affluent places like Europe, the U.S. and Japan, is trickling down surprisingly quickly to the developing world. American futurist Howard Rheingold calls the 3 billion cell phones worldwide “the poor man’s connection to the web”. He continues: “The developing world uses cell phones to get the info they need; they may not think of it as Internet access. Fishermen can find out where the good catches are; farmers can check commodity prices; subsistence workers know when there’s day labor in a neighboring town.” John Urry, sociology professor and director of the Centre for Mobilities Research in Britain’s Lancaster University, affirms that mobility reaches even those who can’t afford to travel constantly: “In poorer places there’s still plenty of contact with mobility as hosts, receiving visitors from afar.” He also notes poorer world-travelers like students, au pairs and casual workers are forming a growing, more democratic mobile class.
Mobile architecture can dovetail with affordable housing and other pressing third-world issues. South African architect Eric Bigot founded Zenkaya (www.zenkaya.com) as a dual-action social project, first providing manufacturing jobs to locals and eventually better affordable housing. “I’d like to manufacture Zenkaya at an affordable cost [here], using and improving South African labor, and then finish and assemble them onsite in the States for that market,” Bigot explains. If costs drop in wealthier places, he avers, it could jumpstart prefab housing at all price points globally.
HOME IS WHERE YOU ARE
Mobility design deals as much with staying put as with movement. Futurists predict mobile technologies like web-enabled video screens in our eyeglasses, super-charged video conferencing, even wireless devices embedded in our bodies. All enlarge the triumph of self over the limits of place - without moving one bit. Constancy and rootedness in the midst of travel and change stand for something after all.
Melinda Stokes, an Australian clothing designer based in Berlin, creates clothes for travelers with this sense of constancy in mind (www.stokx.de). Her clothes abound in pockets and ergonomic fabrics, keeping the rough-and-ready traveler unfussed and stylish at all times and places. “When we travel, we don’t actually transform,” she explains. “We’re still ourselves, with the style we had when we left. It’s quite a strong thing, clothing. There’s a kind of protection about it; it gives you a particular sense of self.” And who wants to leave home without that?
—Jude Stewart for DIRECTIONS, Spring/Summer 2007
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