8 April 2011

Mobile architecture workshop first night

12 people gathered with Mary Mattingly tonight  to talk about mobile architecture. The group composition was visual artists, a poet, graduate students in landscape architecture and fine arts, sustainable living advocates, a professional sewer, and representatives from Musagetes Foundation. We met at Diyode a space in downtown Guelph that is the place to go if you need a workshop space and/or want to learn how to use tools to make your projects.

Mary started off with a slide show with images of houses, shelters and installation/sculpture projects that reflected her interest in exploring how materials and structures could be used as mobile architecture, There was a far ranging and open-ended discussion on what this 5 day workshop might look like with some  keen on creating an actual structure, and others interested in open ended discussion about the topic without feeling the necessity to end with an actual construction. 

Mobility Architecture was interpreted in a variety of ways including something that was carried, unfolded, rolled, paddled,  attached, detached, recycled, or sourced from natural materials. We talked about where mobility architecture was already used (refugee camps, disaster response, homelessness, overcrowding, travelling)   and circumstances that might require people to use it in Guelph like natural disaster or urban crowding.  While emergency preparedness and disaster response are one lens to view mobility architecture, we also talked about it in relation to community building, gatherings, swaps, ways of creating something that could be used for individual protection and also attach to others to form larger structures.

Some of the names in the slide show included;
Archigram 
Constant Niewenhuys New Babylon Project
Andrea  Zittel  
Teddy Cruz    
The Snail Shell System by the Danish Art Collective N55
Michael Rakowitz's ParaSITE Project

Other idea sources mentioned were;
The Everyday Carry  
Rolling Homes: Handmade Houses on wheels by Jane Lidz

When I got home I also came across Mobile Structures Resources which has links to lots of mobile ideas
and X2 Shelters by GEOtectura that also has developed some fantastical ideas about structures of the future.




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