FLOCK HOUSE TIMELINE:

Within the traditional parka of an Inuit woman a pouch under an enlarged hood designed carry her baby. The word originates from the root 'amaq' which means 'to carry'. The amautiq was traditionally worn by every woman regardless of marital status. In wearing the amautiq, young women took on the symbol responsibility of raising the next generation. Usually sewn from caribou and seal fur.

Yurt or Ger is a traditional portable Mongolian habitation consisting of a wooden frame and felt walls. Yurts are designed to be easy to take apart, transport, and reconstruct. Despite this portability, they are warm enough to keep the coldest winter temperatures at bay and strong enough to withstand strong winds and the demands of a whole family.

The architecture of the Turkana depends on the availability of materials and the type of livestock the family owns. Communities with little or no livestock tend to construct the most elaborate homes because they do not need to migrate. Homesteads around the Lodwar area and by the shores of Lake Turkana are examples of beautifully elaborated homes, carefully built and adapted to the hot and dry climate of the District. Truly nomadic communities build simple homes. In such cases of temporary occupation, huts may be a little more than half a dome facing away from the sun. In contrast to other semi-nomadic tribes, the Turkana do not carry building materials with them when they move. Everything that is required is collected afresh at each new camp. Any portable possessions, such as calabashes and other utensils are loaded onto donkeys. It is common practice for the Turkana to use building materials left behind by other homesteads although it is very rare for a family to reoccupy an abandoned homestead. People living along the Kerio River around the areas of Lokori build their homes on stilts. This style, found nowhere else in the district, suits conditions where the terrain becomes a quagmire during heavy rainfall. It also lessens the problem of termite infestation and increases air circulation, thus reducing the risk of malaria. Link

Triton City was to be a floating place of residence for up to 5,000 inhabitants and designed to be resistant to tsunamis and other natural forces that floating cities might encounter on the water. Somewhat amazingly, these designs were approved by the Navy as well as the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the United States. In fact, Baltimore even planned at one point to construct one of these and install it in Chesapeake Bay until governments changed and plans fell through.

Constant Nieuwenheus: New Babylon employed automation of all "useful" repetitive activities at the mass level, collective land ownership and the means of production, and alleviation of collective timekeeping. New Babylon is a Utopian anti-capitalist city designed in 1959-74 by artist-architect Constant Nieuwenhuys. Henri Lefebvre explained: "a New Babylon -- a provocative name, since in the Protestant tradition Babylon is a figure of evil. New Babylon was to be the figure of good that took the name of the cursed city and transformed itself into the city of the future."[1] The goal was the creating of alternative life experiences, called 'situations'.

David Greene's 1966Living Pod. Description: 
Part One, a Pod … Colour, bonded white. Twelve support nodes (six tension, six compression). Four apertures (25 per cent surface). one access aperture, all with vacuum fixing seals, inner bonded sandwich of insulation and /or finish. Multi-purpose inflating floor 45 per cent area. Part Two: Machinery, four automatic self-levelling compression legs for maximum 5 feet of water or 40-degree slope. Two transparent sectionalised sliding aperture seals with motors. Transparent entry seal with ramp and hydraulics. Two wash capsules with electrostatic disposal, air entry, and total automatic body cleaning equipment. One only with total body water immersion possibility. Two rotating silos for disposable toilet and clothing objects, etc. Vertical body hoist. Climate machinery for temperate zone (with connections to inflating sleep mats and warm section of inflating floor). Non-static food dispenser with self-cook modifications. Non-static media, teach and work machine with instant transparent cocoon ring. Inflating screens to sleep mats.

Appraisal: Although this capsule can be hung within a plug-in urban structure or can sit in the open landscape it is still a ‘house’. Really one is left with a zoomland trailer home. Probably a dead end. A basic assumption that must be reassessed in terms of the possibility of increasing personal mobility and technological advance. Anything is probable. The outcome of rejecting permanence and security in a house brief and adding instead curiosity and search could result in a mobile world – like early nomad societies. In relation to the Michael Webb design, the Suit and Cushicle would be the tent and camel equivalent; the node cores an oasis equivalent: the node cluster communities conditioned by varying rates of change. It is likely that under the impact of the second machine age the need for a house (in the form of permanent static container) as part of man’s psychological make-up will disappear. With apologies to the master, the house is an appliance for carrying with you, the city is a machine for plugging into.

"The question of knowing how one would live in a society that knows neither famine nor exploitation nor work, in a society in which, without exception, anyone could give free rein to his creativity -- this troubling, fundamental question awakens in us the image of an environment radically different from any that has hitherto been known, from any that has been realized in the field of architecture or urbanism. The history of humanity has no precedent to offer as an example, because the masses have never been free, that is, freely creative. As for creativity, what has it ever meant but the output of a human being?" - Constant's New Babylon: The Hyper-architecture of Desire by Mark Wigley

1956-1958 Yona friedman wrote his Manifesto: L’Architecture movile which set out the  deomcratoc preoccupations of young designers of the time. Spatial City by Yona Friedman: "The framework was to be erected first, and the residences conceived and built by the inhabitants inserted into the voids of the structure."

Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City, 1958: Mobility and information conveying systems are prerequisites for Broadacre. Wright esteems the importance of "communication machines" as follows: Everywhere now human voice and vision are annihilating distance - penetrating walls. Wherever the citizen goes (even as he goes) he has information, lodging and entertainment. He may now be within easy reach of general or immediate distribution of everything he needs to have or to know: All that he may require as he lives becomes not only more worthy of him and his freedom but convenient to him now wherever he may choose to make his home. Broad Acre City wasn't a design for a single community, as much as a kind of organic zoning plan for the entire country. Wright believed each American family should be entitled to an acre of land and a car. The property lines and building sites would conform to the contours of the landscape, not the rigid grid system proposed by Jefferson and his followers. There would also be a pattern of greenspaces, community gardens, walking trails, parks and wildlands, concepts that he adapted from the English garden cities designed by William Morris . Wright's idea was that each town would be self-sufficient, with growth limited by available water supplies and arable land. The city starts with the single family house. Due to Broadacre's economical logic it is being built by oneself (in a DIY network). Using standardized elements and partly prefabricated building modules it is fairly extendable (in Wright's terms "organic" XVI.) 15 ). But first of all it is affordable, although money has almost no relevance in Broadacre.) The Usonian House as a typology evolves.

Cedric Price's Fun Palace: The idea of Fun Palace was to build a ‘laboratory of fun’ with facilities for dancing, music, drama and fireworks. Using an unenclosed steel structure, fully serviced by travelling gantry cranes the building comprised a ‘kit of parts’: pre-fabricated walls, platforms, floors, stairs, and ceiling modules that could be moved and assembled by the cranes. Virtually every part of the structure was variable. “Its form and structure, resembling a large shipyard in which enclosures such as theatres, cinemas, restaurants, workshops, rally areas, can be assembled, moved, re-arranged and scrapped continuously,” promised Price.

Cedric Price's Thinkbelt: we should look to a thoroughly adaptive building, comprising modular components which could be assembled, reconfigured or regrouped as the situation demands. Perhaps even a connected network of buildings scattered throughout the city, just as design itself is. Cedric Price: let’s learn how to use and re-use the buildings we already have. In short, let’s declare a moratorium on all new buildings. Hardly music to architects’ ears! - Quote from the blog of Lebbeus Woods.

In 1959 a group of Japanese architects and city planners joined forces under the name the Metabolists. Their vision of a city of the future inhabited by a mass society was characterized by large scale, flexible and extensible structures that enable an organic growth process. In their view the traditional laws of form and function were obsolete. They believed that the laws of space and functional transformation held the future for society and culture. Metabolism's development in Post World War II Japan meant that much of the work produced in the movement is primarily concerned with housing issues.

It described a new kind of mobility not of the buildings, but for the inhabitants, who are given a new freedom.
Mobile architecture is the "dwelling decided on by the occupant" by way of "infrastructures that are neither determined nor determining". Mobile architecture embodies an architecture available for a "mobile society". To deal with it, the classical architect invented "the Average Man". The projects of architects in the 1950s were undertaken, according to Friedman, to meet the needs of this make-believe entity, and not as an attempt to meet the needs of the actual members of this mobile society.
The teaching of architecture was largely responsible for the "classical" architect's under-estimation of the role of the user. Furthermore this teaching did not embrace any real theory of architecture. Friedman proposed then teaching manuals for the fundamentals of architecture for the general public. The spatial city, which is a materialization of this theory, makes it possible for everyone to develop his or her own hypothesis. This is why, in the mobile city, buildings should: touch the ground over a minimum area; be capable of being dismantled and moved; and be alterable as required by the individual occupant.

An Archigram project…provides a new agenda where nomadism is the dominant social force; where time, exchange, and metamorphosis replace stasis; where consumption, lifestyle and transience become the programme; and where the public realm is an electronic surface enclosing the globe. This statement by David Greene of Archigram was printed in 1999 and edited by  Crompton, Dennis in the book "Concerning Archigram" and describes a notion of mobility quite different from that of Constant’s New Babylon, embracing consumerism, disposability, and a multisensory environment. Archigram was facilitating the Spectacle and feeding its ravenous hunger for social fragmentation and highly networked yet ultimately disenfranchised subjects.

Archizoom's «No-Stop City» (1969) is an ironic critique of the ideology of architectural modernism taking onto its absurd limits: «The real revolution in radical architecture is the revolution of kitsch: mass cultural consumption,pop art, an industrial-commercial language. There is the idea of radicalizing the industrial component of modern architecture to the extreme.

Living in Space (Stewart Brand’s Space Colonies)

Dome Over Manhattan, Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s dome over Manhattan. “[Fuller] envisioned cutting people off from the elements entirely by building domed cities, which, he claimed, would offer free climate control, winter and summer,” Kolbert writes. “‘A two-mile-diameter dome has been calculated to cover Mid-Manhattan Island, spanning west to east at 42nd Street,’ he observed. ‘The cost saving in ten years would pay for the dome.’”

Mobile Homesteading and the home I grew up in.

Highrise of Homes, 1980’s James Wines. The Highrise of Homes was to combine the conveniences of urban living with a sense of individuality not typically found in a large city. No two homes were to be alike. On the ground floor of the complex, residents would find a grocery store, shops, a garden, office spaces, a parking lot, and entertainment facilities. Residents would access their homes on different levels via elevator.

The Gardens d’Antilla à Mumbai (2004), James Wines. The entire tower is conceived as a garden in the sky and responds to Vastu principles in historic Hindu architecture. Within this tradition, the spine is regarded as the main source of support, leading upward toward enlightenment. The seven levels of the residence are supported by a stratified structural spine, reinforced with a series of steel cables that include five “floating” floor planes and a variety of interim garden tiers, terraces, water features, recreational facilities, and enclosed, living areas that takes advantage of the most spectacular views of Mumbai and its waterfront.

Kobo Abe's "The Box Man": (originally published as 箱男, 1973), one of his most famous works, is a powerful metaphor about the high-speed economic growth in 1960s Tokyo, and the problems arising from it.The novel begins with the first of many images, a photographic negative showing the figure of a man. Beside this image is what appears to be a newspaper clipping with the headline, “CLEAN SWEEP OF UENO HOBOS- Check This Morning-180 Arrests”. The clipping relates a police round-up of hobos caught ironically, “behind the Tokyo Institute of Culture

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty was built entirely of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks, earth, and water on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah, it forms a 1,500-foot-long (460 m), 15-foot-wide (4.6 m) counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the lake which is only visible when the level of the Great Salt Lake falls below an elevation of 4,197.8 feet

Agnes Denes: Wheatfield -- A Confrontation, the artwork yielded 1,000 lbs. of wheat in the middle of New York City to comment on "human values and misplaced priorities".

Lebbius Wood's DMZ Line

Why are these “super-adobe” homes so feasible for a moon structure? Consider the amount of materials it takes to build one home, then ask yourself how we can get the same materials to the moon.

Biosphere 2 is a 3.14-acre (12,700 m2) structure originally built to be an artificial, materially-closed ecological system in Oracle, Arizona (USA) by Space Biosphere Ventures, a joint venture whose principal officers were John P. Allen, inventor and Executive Director, and Margret Augustine, CEO. Constructed between 1987 and 1991, it was used to explore the complex web of interactions within life systems in a structure that included five areas based on natural biomes and an agricultural area and human living/working space to study the interactions between humans, farming and technology with the rest of nature. Biosphere 2's current mission is: To serve as a center for research, outreach, teaching and life-long learning about Earth, its living systems, and its place in the universe; Catalyze interdisciplinary thinking and understanding about Earth and its future; Be an adaptive tool for Earth education and outreach to industry, government, and the public; Distill issues related to Earth systems planning and management for use by policymakers, students and the public.

Ritchie Sowa’s Island, 2000 http://spiralisland.blogspot.com/

Rebekah Creshkoff accounts, "THOUSANDS of birds were behaviorally trapped in the columns of light. The beams were visibly filled with birds for their entire height, looking like clouds of bugs. Their twittering was audible. Their brightly illuminated bodies were reflected in the windows of nearby buildings -- 3 World Financial Center and the movie theatre. The light was so bright, some birds looked as though they were on fire. There were so many birds, it was impossible to track any one individual for any length of time. I did see one bird that circled in and out of the uptown beam six times before I lost track. Each time, the bird stayed in the light for from 3 to 9 seconds."

Are portable camps (military, corporate and otherwise) a precursor to a world consisting of ever-more-completely mobile cities, disposable settlements that are strategically erected overnight but might disappear the very next day?

Teddy Cruz's Borderlands. http://www.spatialagency.net/database/estudio.teddy.cruz Teddy Cruz's practice is situated in and informed by the Tijuana/San Diego borderzone. Although the border itself is becoming more and more militarised, it remains porous through the counter-tactics of those who transgress it, tunnelling under or moving across in the cover of darkness. Whilst these 'illegal' people move northwards, all sorts of objects, large and small move southwards; the excess of US consumer society, from houses that were to be demolished to disused tyres, are moved across the border to be recycled and reused. It is in the context of this continual flow back and forth that Cruz places his own practice. Taking inspiration from the ways in which informal settlements creatively reuse 'waste' material and make flexible spaces with overlapping programmes, he creates an affordable architecture in the US and Mexico, working with NGO's and non-profit organisations on both sides of the border.

The above picture is a tent city in Reno Nevada and it is just one of the many tent cities that are springing up around the US. The result of the current economy in the US has resulted in an increase of Americans who find themselves homeless. This particular one in Reno is home for 150 homeless citizens who have become the latest statistic in the rise of homelessness in the US.  While we read about the current state of economic turmoil in the US, it is a rarity to actually see the results of these hard times that all Americans are facing. Well, guess what folks? Tent cities are on the rise throughout the US and will probably continue to increase as the economy worsens. Tent cities are becoming a landscape of the America of 2008.

The Waterpod Project. The Waterpod is a floating world that demonstrates future pathways for nomadic, mobile shelters and water-based communities, docked and roaming. Link

Yousef Al-Mehdari suggests that a careful study of human bodily movement could serve as a basis for generating new types of architectural form.

MAD Architects, 2009 "The city is no longer determined by the leftover logic of the industrial revolution (speed, profit, efficiency) but instead follows the ‘fragile rules’ of nature."

Santiago Cirugeda Link

TransHab was a concept pursued by NASA to develop the technology for expandable habitats inflated by air in space. Specifically, TransHab was intended as a replacement for the already existing rigid International Space Station crew Habitation Module. When deflated, inflatable modules provide an 'easier to launch' compact form. When fully inflated, TransHab would expand to 8.2 meters in diameter. Link

With over ten years of research and development, Bigelow Aerospace designs affordable options for spaceflight to national space agencies and corporate clients. In 2006 and 2007, they launched orbiting prototypes Genesis I and Genesis II, and are currently working on new-generation spacecraft. Using patented expandable habitats, their plan is to greatly exceed the usable space of the International Space Station at a fraction of the cost.

Kim Jin-suk Living in Crane in Busan, South Korea: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14273504

Terreform One's Fab Tree Hab: This home concept is a method to grow homes from native trees. A living structure is grafted into shape with prefabricated Computer Numeric Controlled (CNC) reusable scaffolds, enabling dwellings to be fully integrated into an ecological community.