Architecture's odyssey past spatial and material motion includes temporal, functional and social shifts

Mar-Apr 2001 | With its feeder fields of business, design, art, and politics softening in the white-hot crucible of synergy, architecture is feeling the heat. The pressure to rethink dated notions of permanence and timelessness is mounting as users demand more speed, more adaptability, more range of motion. With social structures like religion, nationality, and family becoming increasingly fractured, how can buildings retain inscribed meanings? If the global flaneurs making use of socially cohesive structures are moving, then architecture must move along with them.

Mobility in this context extends beyond spatial and material motion to encompass temporal, functional, and social shifts. The long history of sliding fusama panels in Japanese homes, for example, reveals how a structure's mobility can both reflect as well as determine how a culture deals with a social issue such as privacy. Yet mobile structures have traditionally been considered distinctly less worthy than their grander cousin, the architecture of mammoth static forms. But among the colossal temples and megalomaniac monuments, this spy-poor cousin has been making steps toward recognition. With a much-needed jump-start from digital technology, mobile architecture is now jockeying successfully for a place alongside the umpteenth cathedral.

It's an architecture that comes with a variety of names: vernacular, transient, tensile, liquid, primitive, nomadic. It need not mean that a building is transportable, only that it can be moved in meaningful, and preferably reversible, ways. An otherwise static building can achieve a state of perpetual motion by having its informational content constantly updated and reprogrammed. Imagine a building's central structural element being a neutral container, with everything that makes it unique—its architecture—being created as needs dictate. There's also a kind of symbolic or suggested mobility in some architecture, such as the fantastic curves of Frank Gehry, or vast projections onto static surfaces that bring movement to the beholder. Mobile architecture, then, can be defined not merely in terms of movable structures, but rather as a way of intelligently inhabiting a specific environment at a specific time and place in a way that better reacts to increasingly frequent social shifts.

Freedom From Place

Architectural mobility provides a certain safety. Be it in response to the economy, the climate, a whim—it is a manifestation of autonomy in an increasingly commodified and demarcated world. Which is why transportable structures have continuously cluttered the margins of human industriousness: from houses Vietnamese farmers dismantle and carry to the next village to the durably abjured Borscht Belt fantasy of a top-of-the-line RV replete with satellite dish, security cameras, and global positioning systems.

Still, academic respect for the earliest mobile structures has remained elusive. Studies of such have widely been considered the province of anthropology, or even archaeology. The history of architecture has largely been written by sedentary sorts firmly embedded in Western traditions, who have traditionally downgraded mobile structures as too primitive or otherly to be architecture. The degree to which a culture has settled down is often unfairly equated with its degree of civilization or progress, a view that privileges grand public structures like churches and congress halls over more modest domestic ones like huts and tents, as rootedness has reflexively been considered quite a positive thing.

With some exceptions, of course. Mobile housing was a fertile playground for many theorists throughout the 20th century. In 1920 Le Corbusier wrote about how a French aircraft manufacturer could easily convert its hangars to build mobile houses in Model-T fashion. The introduction of new materials, such as ultralight fiber-based elements replacing steel, has also been key to mobile architecture's gradual climb. From futuristic pure-energy plasma walls to the more tenable foam panels used for short-term, relocatable housing (e.g., for the military, migrant workers, or disaster victims), these new materials play into the ur-American concepts of progress through technology and the right to infinite mobility, the dream of being able to pack everything into the station wagon and start over from scratch.

Infinite Adjustment

The earliest frontier homes ordered from the Sears catalogue were designed with wings that could be added or removed as economic and weather conditions dictated. Buckminster Fuller relished the opportunity to one day modify a building's structural elements as they became technologically outmoded, and drew sketches of giant domes floating in the sky, not entirely unlike Lando Calrissian's Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back. Through the 1960s, radical experiments by the U.K. collective Archigram (short for "architectural telegram"), Austria's Coop Himmelblau, and Japan's Metabolist Group picked up this thread of inhabiting infinitely recognizable cloudlike structures hovering above the prickly issues (like gravity) that had been dogging architecture since day one.

Archigram's 1964 Walking City proposal—an urban blob on giant legs that could up and go when the going got too tough—was obviously aiming for a certain degree of shock value. A more likely "humanization" of buildings is proceeding apace today. In his 1995 book Visionary Architecture, German author Christian W. Thomsen describes buildings with adjustable, skinlike sensors that detect motion, weight, and heat; cameras that scan like eyes; microphones and speakers that can hear and talk; and alarms that mimic flee-or-fight reactions, with the structures learning all the while by recording this information: actual baby steps forward would seem the inevitable result.

Buildings are being created with structural elements that actually move. Depending on the situation, a floor can become a ceiling, or a window can double as a wall. One trend is toward a neutral, stripped-down container serving as a structure's base, which is then adapted using changeable materials, textiles, software, screens, and sounds as needed. As architect Richard Rogers wrote in 1996's Projects and Buildings: "inflexible buildings hinder the evolution of society, inhibiting new ideas.... New materials exist that are capable of changing from high insulation to low, from opaque to transparent, that can react organically to the environment, respond to the daily environmental cycle, and transform themselves through the seasons." The Pompidou Center he designed with Renzo Piano is a relatively recent example of this, where the infrastructural elements are all located on the building's periphery, leaving the center open for an infinitely expandable array of functional possibilities. An alternate riff on this concept is Gerrit Rietveld's Schroeder House from way back in 1923, whose inhabitants could slide walls into any combination of rooms; the stairwell and bathroom central are fixed, the motion centered around this main axis.

Technological progress, of course, has played a major role in nudging architecture not only toward new materials, but also toward the immaterial. Advances in virtual reality now make previously inconceivable transgressions of geometry possible, as the architectural walk-through remains VR's killer app. VR allows for fantastical structures that make a mockery of Euclidean rules, simulating objects or transformations that would be too costly or dangerous to tamper with in the real world, and testing out all manner of materials, shapes, and colors along the way.

All Together Now

From the portable to the changeable to the immaterial, we are led to futuristic communities consisting of all three; by connecting these units in networks, buildings can begin to communicate. As architectural theorist Ole Bouwman suggested in the most recent "Doors of Perception" conference in Amsterdam, this means that "architecture travels, multiplies, becomes a migrant." Architects "stage-manage moving situations," as "space becomes genuinely fluid; it forms the link by which the digital space can flow into the real space of daily life ... Who will be the first architect to win an Oscar for Best Director?"

On a grander urban-planning scale, all this motion means cities, too, will be able to change faster, which they'll need to do to in order to keep up with the speed of change elsewhere. Winy Maas of the Dutch firm MVRDV designs projects that make use of wildly interchangeable elements: rooms that jut out of walls, forests in the middle of office buildings. By relying on a lighter infrastructure devoid of the massive pipes and foundations that bog down project budgets, large collectives of buildings can become mobile units that react in unison to different situations, much the way that farmers rotate crops.

This concentration of mobile, vertically stacked blocks would free up more room for nature in his very cramped country. Maas has proposed how the Netherlands—a country of 16 million with a land mass roughly equal to the state of New Jersey—could itself be turned into a large but manageable city. Likewise, fellow Dutch architect Lars Spuykbroek of NOX has proposed a system where highway drivers could tune into the residential areas they otherwise pass through obliviously: microphones embedded in a neighborhood's concrete could transmit the sounds from a particular street or playground, which would then be broadcast on local radio much like local traffic reports. This would allow for a new layer of connection between, say, commuters in New York City racing out to the 'burbs along the Cross Bronx Expressway and the otherwise unacknowledged communities they're passing through, hopefully decreasing their sense of anonymous detachment.

In ways like this, the future of mobile architecture is pointing toward a mixture of the digital and the tangible: buildings remain solid, with everything that imbues them with meaning modifiable. Helmut Tichy of the Technical University in Vienna has proposed cyber-hotels where the visitor carries along a card that has his or her room preferences programmed into it—room color, temperature, lighting—so those preferences can be then plugged into the empty shell of a room to give it a character. A project that fuses many of these ideas is Trans-Ports, a proposal designed by Bouwman and the architectural agency Oosterhuis.nl. It places the building's structure on a series of pneumatic pumps that actually alter its volume depending on the current function: it shrinks and swells like a giant bellows. The project's maze of flexible display screens allows the background to permanently change based on input from individuals, environmental conditions, or data received from other structures. Its various modes then allow the structure to serve as a performance space showing video, a "total commercial" for a specific client, a research center displaying specific information, a gallery lined with art, or a teleconferencing center. Bouwman explains: "This is the new form of time sharing ... a serious attempt to achieve a truly moving structure, governed both by direct physical and remote digital input."

So if these various mobile concepts have been with us for centuries, why isn't everyone finally living in a diaphanous pod made of plasma screens? Perhaps for the same reason that mobile homes and Amsterdam houseboats stay stuck to the same spot for years at a time; people buy into the possibility of freedom that mobile living implies, but at the end of the day they're just as happy to cocoon themselves in brick-and-mortar houses that ooze history out of every cornice. While the dream of escaping from restrictive structures is a compelling one, it competes with the elevated desire for social cohesion that can be so fleeting in an increasingly fragmented world. Do people really want to slide walls around their houses at 2 A.M. before they can go to sleep? Just as people don't necessarily want to order clothes they've never touched, or interactively choose an ending to a film, perhaps they don't feel any real need to live in zippy Lego shells.