Very Large Structure is a proposal by Manuel Domínguez for a mobile land management mega-machine for Castile and León in Spain. It's a walking city, for want of a better term, though rather than conceived as a global wanderer perpetually moving on to greener pastures, the VLS remains in basically the same place to tend to and improve the pastures that it's got.
To save me the time of summarizing the project, which is impressively researched and fleshed out, I'll direct you to his entire PowerPoint presentation being hosted at Taller al Cubo.
Before you head out to download the file, I want to quickly invoke the opening line of Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines, the first in a quartet of novels about walking cities (on tracts, like the VLS) in a resource-depleted future preying on smaller walking cities and their supplies, literally swallowing them whole when caught —
It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.
— and hope that that should cue a parallel world Dakar Rally in which walking cities race against each other. On the dried-out bed of the Mississippi River, Chicago compete against Manhattan once every four years down towards the Gulf of Mexico, and the winner not only will enlarge their hunting ground but also represent North America in the world championship held in the silted expanse of the former South China Sea.
[First posted February 4, 2007. If I could restart this blog all over again, I would reconceptualize it as a travel agency blog advertorializing its packaged tactical tours. I'll even have postcards to sell!]
About three hours northwest of Mexico City, in the Parque EcoAlberto, a reporter from The New York Times got to experience “one of Mexico’s more bizarre tourist attractions: a make-believe trip illegally crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico into the United States.”
For about $18, you get to cross deserts, hills, brambles and riverbeds, and have men playing Border Patrol guards chase after you and taunt you from somewhere in the dark: “Ya sé que están escondidos. We know you’re hiding. We’re going to send you back to Mexico.”
Interestingly, the organizers received financial help from the Mexican government.
The article also tells us that “the idea of tourists’ aping immigrants can seem crass, like Marie Antoinette playing peasant on the grounds of Versailles. But the guides describe the caminata as an homage to the path immigrants have beaten across the border. And the park’s approach to consciousness-raising is novel, but not completely unique. In 2000, the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders set up a camp of tents, medical stations and latrines in Central Park to recreate the setting of a refugee camp. Last year, the refugee-camp project returned to New York and also traveled to Atlanta and Nashville.”
What the organizers should do next is join forces with these Latvian hoteliers, and develop a whole series of packaged reality tours, recreating death marches, diasporas, and other mass displacements of people.
For instance, rather than experiencing the Cold War holed up inside a building, you set out on a gulag-bound train, inside a boxcar packed with fifty other adventurers, and with only an inch or two opening between the wooden panels through which you can view the passing beauty of the Russian steppes. You try reading Solzhenitsyn, of course, but there aren't nearly enough light, and the sound of metal grating on metal and that smell — what is that smell! — make it difficult to concentrate.
If warm weather is to your liking, there's the Bataan Death Tour. Searing temperatures. Humid air — thick, gelatinous, in your crotch. Sun beating down heavily on your head. The din of the forest. The specter of cholera. Hired Filipinos as Japanese soldiers barking orders.
Also on offer is the Armenian Death Tour. But as this would be impossible to recreate in Turkey, a substitute for the desert of Deir ez-Zor will have to be found in France.
Upon learning of the shortage of slaughterhouses due to proliferation of small, independent farms catering to locavores, Theo Jansen has transformed his unburdened beasts into nomadic abattoirs. Before only the salty air of the coast breezed through their skeletal frames, now pasture-raised livestock pass through its pneumatic innards, ensanguining and disemboweling them with precision. They can even milk cows.
Once the job is done, they set off to another homestead. They move through the landscapes with the same plodding calmness of a herd of elephant. Gentle creatures but with a violent and bloody vocation. If there's no appointment, they simply go out to pasture, grazing side by side with the comestibles. On weekends, they are corralled to the local farmer's market.
1) David Bowen's Swarm, as described by Art in America, consists of “a plastic globe propped up by long rods attached to a wheeled platform, which moves erratically within a black circle on the floor. Its path...is determined by the progress of a swarm of flies captured inside the globe. A sensor attached to a microcontroller at the foot of this device translates the flies' aggregate movement into mechanical motion.”
2) A couple of days ago, Geoff Manaugh giddily reported that “a single-family home in California has been 'invaded' by bees—so much so that honey is now leaking from the electrical outlets, coming 'from a giant beehive behind the walls.'” After the bees, “honey-hungry ants” might soon arrive.
— now less unrelated:
In Walking Apiary, a foreclosed house is propped up by long rods attached to a wheeled platform, which moves erratically around an abandoned suburban development. Its path is determined not by the paved streets circling around empty lots but by the chaotic activities of bees that have colonized the house. Add more foreclosed houses droning with million of bees, and you have a roving urban honey farm.
It's an overwrought attempt at squishing Archigram into contemporary preoccupations with destabilized ecologies, unpaid mortgages and utopian food systems.
In Hong Kong, 120,000 to 200,000 women from the Philippines work as domestic helpers.
They are women that have sacrificed their personal life to give their own family, their children, a better life and education. They do not have private life. They suffer racism, and in many cases exploitation.
In their only day off, Sundays, they invade the downtown financial and commercial district, where they transform and occupy the streets, bridges, parks, plazas, shopping centre, the main commercial street, and also the emblematic building of the HSBC Hong Kong Bank. These women change the meaning of the commercial public space, where they transport their habits and traditions through leisure, rest, religion and culture. The luxury downtown city on Sundays becomes a domestic space where they meet, rest, eat, dance, play cards and pray.
They impose different codes into the space, building a new and unique human cartography. Their location is precise, constant.
We haven't yet seen this 1-hour documentary, but we're sure it will profoundly resonate with us, as our own immediate and extended family history abounds with stories of displacements. Ours is a transnational family whirled about the world by the diasporic forces of globalization.
Here's the trailer:
This testimony given to the filmmaker by Cecilia, a nurse who has been working in Hong Kong for 10 years, is typical.
I left my home in the Philippines because I needed the money to maintain my family. Working as a domestic helper I could pay the medical studies of my daughter, the education of my five brothers and sisters and the medical assistance of the cardio problems of my father.
But it is difficult to explain the bitterness and the great sacrifices of our lives. We all feel very lonely. We live far away from our husbands, from our sons and from all our loving friends. We do not have our own family life nor a social or cultural environment. It is an immense sacrifice that we do not deserve, even if we are poor. We also suffer discrimination and abuse in our work during the long daily hours.
We must have high school or university studies but we are treated as servants. In most cases we are more qualified than our Chinese employers.
We have only two weeks of holidays every two years of work. Only every two years we can visit our sons, our family. On Sundays we are happy when we invade the open spaces of Hong Kong and meet together to remember our identity and our culture. It is the only day in the week that we can do our personal things like shopping, go to the bank to send our salary to our families, go to Church and send boxes back home full of clothing, shoes, books, toys. This is our only physical contact with them.
We can laugh, sing, dance, eat and share between women our happiness, friendship and the solidarity that we miss in our domestic work. On Sunday we feel happy in foreign land. The parks and streets of the financial district of Hong Kong become Filipino territory, like the plazas of our little towns. The HSBC Bank is our cathedral and the cardboard casitas are our home.
But we are homeless women. At 8 or 9 in the evening we have to return to our job. We cannot sleep at the houses of our employers.
It's interesting to point out the HSBC Bank that Cecilia refers to above. Designed by Norman Foster, its public space was created with a specific urbanist purpose, as as financial and commercial center of the city. An area that otherwise might be empty and abandoned on weekends is instead turned into a bustling small town, somewhat autonomous from the city and with its own parallel economy of exchange and transactions.
Particularly in Rome, they congregate at Santa Pudenziana, the national church of the Philippines; the parking lots of Mussolini's EUR; Metro stations; and crowded post-war tower block apartments on the periphery. In these pop-up piazzas temporarily dotting the eternal Papal and Fascist grid, Filipinos seek relief from feelings of exclusion both from their host country and distant families, find solidarity with their fellow countrymen, and commit acts of resistance through fugitive visibility.
Instead of building a fishladder only long enough to let migrating fishes go around just a single dam, how about one that bypasses not just that one dam or all the dams on the river but the entire river itself?
Starting at the mouth of the river, this fish ladder loops and curlicues a new hydrological continuum, passing through forests and hills and even cities, doing arabesques around mountains, sometimes on stilts and sometimes tethered. Like an aqueduct staggering through the plains of Latium.
Sometimes it flows besides its parent river, which has been nearly desiccated by global warming, Aral Sea-style irrigations or over damming by energy gluttons from faraway Los Angeles and Phoenix. Awaiting the fishes at the end is a reservoir replicating their ancient spawning grounds.
Along the banks of this artificial river valley, this infrastructure of pure ethology, might be a series of public viewing areas from which to view the endangered spectacle of wild animal migration. And/or catch dinner.
When we set out to upgrade our Blogger Classic Template to Blogger Layouts (or is it Blogger Design?), we planned on streamlining the layout down to just one column. But then we accidentally stumbled upon an embeddable personal artificial sun. We were instantly smitten, and knew we had to incorporate it into the new design, single column be damned.
Courtesy of Philippe Rahm and fabric | ch, this sun now flickering above is simply the background color mutating through a 25-hour cycle of bright hues, from warm oranges to fresh greens and cool blues, then back again. These retinal oscillations are an attempt at creating an artificial climate, one which satisfies “the metabolic and physiological requirements of a human being in an environment partially or completely removed from earthly influences: mediated reality, networks and netlag, the disruption of the body clock that comes with air travel, as well as with extra-terrestrial trips and holidays.”
Accessible everywhere and to everybody thanks to the Internet, this artificial climate called i-weather makes it possible to live in a situation completely removed from natural locations by producing an artificial circadian rhythm synchronised to match the inner cycle of the human hormonal and endocrine system. In the absence of the natural terrestrial cycle of day and night, it becomes apparent that this inner cycle in fact lasts around 25 hours, and that body temperature, the alternation between sleep and wakefulness, and the accumulation and secretion of substances such as cortisone and oligopeptides, all depend on it.
Hopefully, then, if you stare for a while at our twinkling blog, any temporal and spatial displacement resulting from marathon coding or CADing sessions might be mitigated.
Of course, you could also hack a TV to blast your room with a pastel maelstrom. At airports all over the world, there could also be coin-operated Artificial Weather Rooms for One in which the eternally jet lagged stabilize themselves with a refreshing technicolor shower. Should such enclosures be considered a security threat, perhaps an iPhone reconfigured as a portable weather machine might be enough to spatially and temporally normalize yourself.
POSTSCRIPT #1: New layout and new look implemented today.
After a series of negotiations between the United Nations, the U.S. Government, the State of Illinois, the City of Chicago and various ward aldermen and their constituents, sovereignties over several neighborhoods on the South and West sides were transferred to the governments of Pacific island nations whose territories have been made uninhabitable by rising sea level. Generously compensated, residents displaced by the new arrivals were relocated to the North side.
The new residents, also generously compensated by carbon-intensive nations in perpetuity or until global warming subsides, then set about colonizing their new homeland: an archipelago of extraterritorial enclaves carved out of the city. Some razed everything to the ground, then unearthed and discarded everything that was underground; they tilled the earth anew. Others adapted to and modified what was there, resulting in a patois of Midwestern and Pacific cultural traditions.
Still another nation-in-exile housed their entire neighborhood-state in vast greenhouse complexes: a City of Glass simulating a tropical memory, luminous at night, gleaming during the day.
What better way to introduce invasive species; cluster bomb pollens on nature-deprived asthmatic children and, to the delight of Big Pharma, Claritin-addicted allergy sufferers; and deplete the coffers of post-econopocalypse cities by littering their streets with fallen fruits and leafy detritus for their under budgeted public works department to clean up, than with a floating mobile garden.
As envisioned by Rael San Fratello Architects, these nomadic gardens “would be suspended in the air from large remotely controlled dirigibles. Each inflatable craft would house thousands of smaller plants attached to long vines. A family of dirigibles would migrate within a city, moving towards areas where the heat island effect is greatest, and also migrate seasonally, traveling to southern cities during winter months and northern cities during summer months.”
One wonders if there will be an outbreak of botanical piracy, whereby someone lassos in one of the floating mobile gardens by the tentacles and anchors it right above his house all summer long, its cooling shades cutting down the use of air conditioning, not to mention the electricity bill.
Perhaps urban adventurers will also snag one of these gardens, but only temporarily, long enough for them to explore its feral tendrils and gelatinous parterres. They'll emerge out of their sewers and their abandoned hospitals, and, squinting hard at the fullness of the sun, they'll climb up, up, up, up towards the clouds, the heaviness of their claustrophobic playgrounds giving way to buoyancy and vistas.
Nearby, meanwhile, will be another parked garden crawling with Avatar cosplayers.
Finally, we read that “each plant is attached to an individual propelled device that allows it to be set free from it’s base. Controlled by GPS and GIS information and organized in flocking patterns, plants move through the city in swarms hydrating, providing shade, and bring oxygen to greenless spaces in the urban field.”
Clearly this means that any rogue robo-botanical hacker will be able to stage a vegetal version of The Birds.
Just remembered that we have these photos of Smout Allen's model of their marvelous Retreating Village. They complement a recent post so well that we can't help but post them.
Like some Nigerian scammer, an article by a London rag baits its readers with this fantastic headline: Pictured: The 1,500-ton Catholic church moved 248ft and rotated 90 degrees to make way for a new road.
When you actually read the half dozen or so sentences, you learn that it wasn't the cathedral that was moved. It wasn't even “part of the church building” but an altogether unattached structure.
However, it's still a very interesting bit of news, more for us because of that circular tracks where it turned 90 degrees.
Those tracks will be disassembled soon, if not already. There's a new road to build. But imagine if that wasn't the case. Infilled with paving materials of local variety, they become part of a new plaza instead — the rectory's nomadic past paved into the landscape.
The landscape is its history.
When it rains, water will collect and flow through shallow channels, following the roundabout path the building once took. Perhaps the whole thing is a rainwater harvesting scheme. When dry, little children, arms shoulder high in imitation of airplanes, will run along these grooves imagined as runways.
Parishioners and pedestrians alike will trip on raised bricks. Bruised knees, sprained ankles, cracked skulls. But those who know the history of the site well, those attuned to the vagaries of their own built environment, will not suffer injuries.
But soon no one will remember the story behind the plaza's intricate parterres. Even the tourist guides will have forgotten, telling their weary travelers that it's just one big cardinal compass, the center of which is the city's Kilometre Zero.
Until, of course, a landscape historian comes along and rediscovers its true function, just in time because the rectory has to be moved to make way for a new road.
Later on, the same scholar goes on to make another awesome discovery: Michelangelo's geometric design for the Piazza del Campidoglio wasn't really intended to help systematize the spatial experience of this jumbled corner of the Capitoline hill.
In actuality, the sculptor-sometimes-urban-planner was merely tracing over the leftover transport system used by victorious Roman generals to move architectural spoils during their triumph. It is also the same system co-opted by later popes to move gigantic relics of saints during Jubilee Year.
Misreading his research, some wacko landscape archi-blogger will publish a post with the headline: Illustrated: St. Peter's makes a pilgrimage around Rome during Jubilee Year 1625. The image of Michelangelo's dome sailing through a sea of architecture, through an eternal maelstrom of history, hypnotized him too much to bother re-reading the PDF file for accuracy's sake.
The following day, he'll offer up a theory of his own: it's some weird Freemasonic machine that can control the fabric of space-time, a direct line to God. But the instructions have been lost over the centuries so now it's up to a subsect of Opus Dei, headed by an albino landscape architect to re-learn how to operate it.
In any case, with some exceptions, like N55's insect-like flood-averting Walking House, moving large structures usually takes two routes: on specially laid tracks or on wheels. The latter seems to be the most common, because it provides better maneuverability and has less infrastructural imprint. It's probably cheaper, too.
But wouldn't it be more fascinating if they were all moved via rails, pressed down into the asphalt so as to make them flush with the surface of the road and then left there once the buildings have reached their destinations?
For whatever reasons — perhaps to escape coastal erosion and sea level rise; to join an enclave of Victorian and Queen Anne houses, all refugees from neighborhoods ravaged by generic condominiums; a concerted policy to homogenize neighborhoods into tourist hot spots; or post-oil, post-capitalist, post-interstate American mobility — more buildings are displaced on old and newly-built rails.
Year after year, then decade after decade, this new supersuface of mobility keeps getting added to, continually overlaid with fresh tracks. It becomes so thick that you no longer need to install new lines, because there is enough tracks and junctions to take you anywhere from anywhere.
Got a job in another town; need to be with your own creative types in the inner city; or can no longer pay the rent in once affordable city neighborhoods and so must look in the urban hinterlands? Simply jack up your house and plop it into the network.
You might need, however, to pick off some asphalt like a dentist to a tartar build-up and fell some trees and uproot some shrubs. Or even temporarily move some buildings out of the way. But you'll eventually get there.
So expansive will this network become that scientists begin to consider it a new geological stratum: a homo-sedimentary layer of reconstituted iron ores. Future geologists and archaeologists will use it for dating artifacts. So will historians use it to re-trace migrations and reconstruct how cities once looked like.
We promise these to be last passages we ever quote from Cornelia Dean's Against the Tides.
In April 1888 [...] Brighton Beach Hotel on Coney Island, a multistory frame structure with scores of rooms, was moved 450 feet inland when it was threatened by erosion. Its owner, the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island Railroad, jacked the thing up and hauled it inland in one piece, using six locomotives, 112 flatcars, and twenty-four specially laid tracks. The structure moved “at a fast walk,” Scientific American reported in its issue of April 14, 1888, adding: “No difficulty of any kind was encountered.”
Images from that issue of Scientific American, including one from the Library of Congress, are replicated below:
A century and a decade later, another substantial structure on the Atlantic coast was moved wholly intact: the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.
When it was built in 1870, the lighthouse was located 1600 feet inland. Sited on one of the most unstable landscapes, where you can witness geological changes occurring in real time, it saw the shoreline getting closer and closer over the years. People feared that without protection the waves would eat away at its foundation, toppling it over. And protect it they tried.
First, the U.S. Navy “installed three groins to trap sand in front of it. Erosion worsened downdrift at the lighthouse. The downdrift groin was strengthened, which helped somewhat, but waves soon began cutting around its southern flank, threatening the lighthouse again.”
Then a businessman helped with the purchase of “the latest thing in shoreline protection technology: artificial seaweed.” After it was installed, “the project quickly failed. Fronds broke loose and caught in the propellers of passing boats. Others ended up in tangles on the beach. It was a mess.”
Asked by officials from the National Park Services, the Army Corps of Engineers drew up plans for a seawall to surround the Cape Hatteras beacon. Everything outside this defensive wall would be allowed to erode away, essentially turning the lighthouse area into a fortified island. As the coastline moves further inland, this new artificial island would migrate out to sea. Should the coastline itself retreat and march out back to sea, perhaps in the next Ice Age, both lighthouse and island would rejoin the mainland: an image we certainly like imagining. Problem was the seawall would block much of the lighthouse, especially its photogenic base. Moreover, the structure rests on a foundation of yellow pine logs. Their “strength is legendary” but could only be maintained if submerged in fresh water. If the lighthouse goes out to sea, salt water will flush it out, and if the fresh water goes, so goes the foundation and the lighthouse.
Since no one wanted to just let nature take its course on the coast and let the lighthouse collapse into a Picturesque ruin for Neo-Romantic tourists, the only other “sensible approach to accelerating erosion,” as the enfant terrible of coastal geopolitics, Orrin H. Pilkey, and others advocate, is: managed retreat.
In July, 1999, “the lighthouse, traveling on steel plate resting on iron rails, arrived at its new site, 1,600 feet inland from the sea.”
Architecture here has been yanked from its isolation and thrown into the wilds of ambiguous conditions, to dynamic forces and flows. If only for a short time, it was opened to the landscape.
Many things tend to remind us of many other things. For instance, the image of King Alfonso XVII's architecturally riotous bathing machine moving back and forth, in imitation of the often hypnotic ebb and flow of the tides, slowly, languorously as one would expect to be when holidaying at the beach, instantly called to mind two projects by the Dutch artist-architect John Körmeling.
The full scale, freestanding structure rotates on rails embedded on a grassy roundabout in Tilburg, the Netherlands. Powered by solar panels, it completes one revolution every 20 hours, its constantly shifting position supposed to evoke a “feeling of alienation from reality.” Front and back gardens were proposed for this permanent art installation but are not yet evident in photographs.
As a public sculpture, the house isn't meant to be inhabited, which begs the obvious question: why not? Perhaps if we wait long enough for the global economic crisis to make vagabond of so many there, we will see it unintentionally colonized.
Moving on to the second: Happy Street.
At first it looks like a proposal for a dense housing project on stilts, wherein residential units flank a roadway curlicued like a roller coaster. Indeed, a photo of a scale model early in its construction (or is it a finished maquette?) shows the street looking like the specialized railway tracks of amusement rides.
We like to think that Körmeling wants to embed a set of rails into the asphalt to facilitate conveyance, because he envisions the units being repositioned, like a certain bathing machine, into a different arrangement every 20 hours. And if his plans become a logistical nightmare, they will remain as infrastructural decoration like half-buried, half-remembered trolley tracks of yesteryear, experienced bumpily by commuters daily.
But perhaps one could more accurately describe Easy Street as a modular city neighborhood of more heterogeneous land uses — sleek condominiums, traditional canal houses, supermarkets, dry cleaners and cultural amenities: a re-interpretation of the cul-de-sac. Dendritic urban planning replaced with multi-dimensional knot topology.
In either case, it's an expected though reasonable urban strategy for a flood prone country with limited space to grow.
Further research online, however, tells us that neither is the case. It is actually the winning concept for the Pavilion of the Netherlands at Expo 2010 in Shanghai.
Bas Haring explains the concept thus:
As the world becomes ever more efficient, it demands more straight streets and rectangular buildings. The fact that the world is becoming more efficient is also eminently logical; efficiency trumps inefficiency. Inefficiency disappears and efficiency endures, and the yet more efficient will in turn also remain. Logical. But is it pleasing? Who is made happy by the efficient, the linear, the rectangular? That is the question Happy Street seems to be posing.
In truth, the linear is somewhat dull. Every straight line looks like every other. Draw a line from one corner of the paper to the other and it is exactly as straight as every other straight line. All things considered there is only one kind of straight line and that is a straight one. Unlike crooked lines. There are millions of kinds of those. Draw a crooked line on the paper, from one corner to the other, or any which way. Odds are that exactly the same crooked line has never been drawn before.
We are like the crooked line: whimsical and unique. Happy Street stands up for the human aspect. For the less efficient. For us.
This is typically Dutch.
So is this, then, a distillation of Dutch landscape and architecture design? “Organized, calculated, efficient, but with room for individuality and whimsicality”?
After working so hard expressing an entire nation's vision of itself, one hopes that the whole structure could be carted away and reused elsewhere instead of rotting on the expo grounds like one of its predecessors. And since we do have a fair amount of interest on coastal development, we propose that it be reassembled on a barrier islands on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and that all units are detached and fastened with wheels.
Better yet, manufacture hundreds of these steel and concrete superstructures and then scatter them along the Atlantic coast from Maine all the way down to the Florida Keys. Instant City.
McDubai®.
And each one would support a community of permanent residents or a nomadic population of weekenders, tourists, summer residents, retirees, and seasonal workers who all come, leave and return again. One could take on the character of a quaint hamlet by the sea or SoHo or an ultra-exclusive seaside resort.
Should you bore of Cape Cod, simply sell your lot space and drive your Dutch-designed cottage or shipping-container-turned-winnebagos or a King Alfonso XIII® off to the Carolinas.
Should your sushi restaurant outlive its novelty among the populace or should there no longer be a great demand for avante-garde films at your cinémathèque, again, just relocate your entire unit to a new settlement.
It's trailer park meets Smout Allen in an interspecies tryst between the vernacular and architecture school academe. In the salty, frothy, heaving surf, genetic materials are exchanged to concoct a deformed Archigram city.
“A century ago,” we read in Against the Tide by Cornelia Dean, “it was easy to abandon coastal land.” What few buildings constructed by the ocean included movable cabins that could be jacked up, rolled on logs and shipped to the mainland on barges; cheap shelters like shacks for shipwrecked mariners that wouldn't be a devastating loss if destroyed; and “informal oceanfront 'camps'”. And then there's Henry Beston, author of The Outermost House, who considered his knapsack as “the only ever-ready wagon of the dunes.” In other words, you could easily retreat to avoid harm's way.
Now, “as coastal land grows in value, beach houses are becoming more and more elaborate. The small dune-sheltered cottage of fifty years ago is a thing of the past. Today new-built houses have four, five, or six bedrooms, each with its own bath, and are equipped with every sort of luxury. Some of these new houses are permanent residences, or second homes. But many are rental properties, which must be lavishly equipped if they are to command the high rents their amortization requires. Vacationers who once came to the beach to enjoy sea breezes now demand air conditioning and cable television.” As Dean eventually summarizes, “rather than retreat from the beach, Americans are digging in,” even after hurricanes after hurricanes have unraveled countless coastal communities into piles of driftwood.
On Happy Street, Florida, meanwhile, everybody can decamp their luxurious, six-bedroom LOT-EK units at a moment's notice and take shelter on Happy Street, South Carolina. Though the landscape will be battered or even dramatically recontoured, you know you will be able to very quickly return your city-on-wheels to your city-on-stilts.
Via del.icio.us/bldgblog, we discovered the above photo from the National Maritime Museum. In the foreground, you see a group of bathing machines en route to the waters off Scarborough in Yorkshire, England.
A common sight in beach resorts in the 19th century, bathing machines allowed women to change their clothes in private, reach the waters without parading through open stretches of beach in their bathing suits, and then frolic about in relative privacy and without violating contemporary notions of modesty. Queen Victoria certainly had one, and like it, these caravans of propriety, of social mores too foreign for our own eyes, were simple wooden structures. Lest they invite voyeurs, they were built without windows, otherwise there were little ones inaccessible to prying eyes. Some were made of canvas and still others were very luxurious affairs, but all of them were on wheels, pulled in and out of the surf by horses or brute human power.
Perhaps there's something to be learned from this outmoded sea-side etiquette. Instead of building a palatial beach house with five bathrooms that will only be used as a summer retreat, you build something more modest, say, a tiny house — on wheels.
When the next Category 5 hurricane eyes your neck of the woods, it, of course, retreats to safer harbors. You don't even have to ask tax payers to bail you out after damaging winds and storm surges have deconstructed your Martha Stewart Living centerfold into driftwood and then ask/beg/litigate again to pay the federal flood insurance of your replacement colossus designed by Toll Brothers. Considering the current economic climate, there probably wouldn't be enough federal money left that can be earmarked for beach fortification that only benefits you, who, in turn, probably couldn't afford a rarely inhabited second (or third or fourth) home.
From a vernacular architecture of Victorian social conventions to a zeitgeist architecture of fiscal sobriety.
In any case, part of the label of the photo reads: “Scarborough made the headlines in 1993 after a landslide caused the Holbeck Hall hotel to fall into the sea.” Holbeck Hall should have been on wheels, too.
Something about the two on a head on collision, domestic spaces of unconventional provenance fulfilling what they were designed to but could not.
In any case, this WMD was meant to address a range of issues “from Homecoming to Homeland Security, from nomadic, American lifestyle to space travel, from military defense budgets to rural poverty. It combines the concerns of the most serious threat to national security and celebrates the distinct and original nature of American humor and invention.”
Is your seaside town in danger of succumbing to the waves, soon to be underwater in the next decade, if not next year?
Is your quaint vacation beach cottage getting swept away by migrating sand dunes?
Has the government finally realized that funneling billions of dollars to build sea defenses is truly a waste and that the good money of good tax payers everywhere can be better spent somewhere else?
Are you going to become a climate change refugee?
If so, and yet you still want to preserve both your house and seaside community, Mark Smout and Laura Allen, or Smout Allen bibliographically, have the solution. Specifically, there is their proposal for a retreating village, as described in their utterly marvelous contribution to the Pamphlet Architecture series, titled Augmented Landscape.
“The coastal village of Happisburgh in North Norfolk is falling into the sea,” the authors tell us. It's a victim of rising sea levels, climate change and government inaction.
While other villages would simply pack everything up and leave, never to return, the duo imagines a condition between flight and colonization, between temporary settlement and permanent retreat, all the while inhabiting a perpetually shifting edge.
“Our proposal for a retreating village of small houses and streets is deployed in the disintegrating territory between the sea and the land. The village reacts to predicted rates of retreat, as much as five meters per year, by sliding and shifting to safer land. To achieve this the scheme employs a mechanical landscape of winches, pulleys, rails, and counterweights, mimicking techniques for hauling boats from the waves. It also adopts [from a millennia's worth of garden and landscape design?] an architectural language of impermanence, of permeable screens, loose-fit structures, and cheap materials that complement and contribute to the nature of the restless landscape.”
In this migrant village, houses are “mounted on steel and concrete skits that allow each house to be dragged” using “pulleys that are anchored in the landscape and attached to the frame.”
Additionally, each one will be accompanied in their slow, nomadic journey with “three-dimensionally woven geotextile bags” that not only reinforce the surrounding soil but will also be used as “allotments for prize-winning vegetables” or “a personal space for sunbathing.”
Immediately one wonders what it would be like to live in a village with a “twitchy attitude,” one that's constantly repositioning and reconfiguring, literally exposed to topography, geography and climate without the stability traditionally afforded by the home.
No solid ground but the unceasing performance of slow disaster. Though you'll still have your house and the sublime view of the sea.
