Day Two Collaboration

Today was day two of the Musagetes sponsored 1Mile2 Mobility Architecture workshop . Four of the group from last night did not return. One called in sick, but no word from the other three. Maybe it was not what they were expecting?

Joining a collaborative interdisciplinary  project like this is different.  You arrive, meet a group of people for the first time and try to arrive at consensus about  how to build something that is based on the idea of mobile architecture.  There are some smart and savvy people participating and ideas galore, but we have to keep the process moving forward if we want to trial run even a partial model in this 19 hour workshop. We made good progress today and a template for tomorrow's work is in place.

Mary showed more slides  and we looked at;
Kevin Cyr - camper bike
Yona Friedman
Philip Beesley
http://www.finalhome.com/ 
aerogel described as looking like frozen smoke
Bigelow Aerospace commercial space stations
Super Adobe structures
and slides of various tent structures from around the world.

I brought in a few things for "show and tell", a 28 year old oiled cotton rain jacket, some reusable food wrap made from bees waxed soaked cloth, Another artist brought in some books to share images of sculptures and houses. I forwarded some links for the group to look at about mobile shelters.

We talked about what each of us imagined a mobile personal structure would like and some people started to sketch their ideas on newsprint on the table. We agreed that we wanted to make something that was portable, wearable and provided both the opportunity for solo shelter, and a way to attach to others to form a  gathering space.We looked at using spooled fabric, jacket, and backpacks.

We had the advantage of 7 hours together today; with a delicious lunch supplied by With the Grain, compliments of Musagetes;  and enough cars to make a field trip to a local recycling depot to look for materials.After lunch we went out looking for materials and came back with a 2 discarded sun umbrella frames and a cover, some aluminum tent poles, and fishing rods.

Back at Diyode, some people started to make a maquette of the structure with coffee filters, stir sticks and coffee lids. One artist used pliers and wire and fashioned a human shaped armature to use to help scale the piece.

As the project started take shape,  and we started to handle the umbrella poles and other recycled items it was clear they were too heavy.

We really wanted shock corded tent poles, so I went home and loaned 3 that extended to 20' each that could be used for the prototype.

Mary and one artist started to think about measurements of the single mobile unit, others continued to think about shape and configuration and revised the design,  and by 4 p.m. we were cutting out a scale model of the fabric pieces and sewing them together. At 4:40 we thought it would be helpful if we had an old style hiking pack with the aluminum external frame and I zipped over to a second hand store and voila!  found what we were looking for and was back in 15 minutes.

Tomorrow we lose one member of the group for the day  ( Happy Birthday!) but hopefully will see some others return to help with cutting and sewing during our three hour session tomorrow.

Rebecca Erickson