seed_womb

... there are times when words can evoke so much more than imagery. Imagery, although still incomplete, is very much more definite in its appraisal and conveyance than the more abstract words.

Individual and alone, distrusting the physical proximity required for communal associations yet inexplicably needing contact.

On occasion this contact can even be of a physical, intimate nature. Most interaction takes place in the ether – the origins of which find themselves in the internet, and prior to that, the telephone, and prior to that, the story.

The will to something has become dangerous. People grow tired of being told – even if it is themselves doing the telling. So, a wander without aim or purpose posits this person of the future. Like a seed: potential capacity afloat, or adfrift, without understood purpose.

The project from the start has always been guided by the idea that there is ultimately an indvidual that is alone physically , but connected to such an extant in the etherea that motives regarding direction in locomotion are not self proclainmed – hence a seed pod ..
The necessity for intimate contact confounds the individual and the space must always allow for the occasional guest.

Technical constraints remain to be resolved.

Updates ..

So the Economist article deals with incredibly strong material derived from spider silk that is coming to market soon -- after that there is a sketch of this idea I am working with where the energy from the turbine does not get converted to chemical energy -- no transformer, not batteries, etc. This is achieved by mechanically compressing air within a canister that is part of the CVH (clothing vehicle home) . When inflation of components becomes necessary the pressure within the canister is then released.

The pressurized air contains a tremendous amount of potential energy that - if there are no leaks -- can be stored and retrieved at will, perhaps feeding excess air pressure into a communal turbine site that then can convert the mechanical into chemical, or kinetic energy.

Kenneth Snelson show -- posted below.

R and D

In trying to develop the right balance between architecture and what might be termed science fiction, I went back to the library and did some more research. The idea of vehicle as clothing as house, or home, has many precedents: particularly in the 1960's and 70's. Many are from the Archigram.

I can only imagine that the times then were infused with a then strange new combination of both individualism and collectivism, in the western world at least, that these mobile, yet possibly permanent, structures came to manifest for a brief moment in time.

Technology, nature, and the human condition, it seems, were not to be made exclusive -- and the resultant forms demonstrate an interconnectedness that I believe will be a driving element in my project as well. I too enjoy the concept of using technology in a productive way to allow for self-sustaining locomotion and habitability, but I want to steer away from any 'magic bullets' like an overdependance on solar power -- or batteries the size of molecules, and so on.

My research is therefore more rooted in mechanical systems that are legible and, aside from an increased performative measure with regard to the material properties themselves, quite possibly buildable at any point in time.

it has been known since 1884 that a spherical soap bubble is the least-area way of enclosing a given volume of air (a theorem of H. A. Schwarz)

Continuing with the mechanical/technical approach toward advancing the design ...

I think the idea of a site inherently implies a construct of time within a temporal period.

For instance: the Haimalayas were once under water -- although the 'site' spelled in global co-ordinates may be the same the geo-physical condition is markedly different now than it had been 50m years ago.


Also the definition of a site inherently has as a parameter : a lack of mobility. ( in german, and possibly in other cultures/languages for instaAlsonce, real estate is classified, translated, as immobilien -- quite legibly, for us im- mobile -- lack of mobility -- stationary)


On a cultural level, one must question migration itself -- does a migratory condition preclude the potential existence of a site? When a living being dies in a particular place in its journey,
the journey remains dynamic, the place of death becomes immortalized.

A site, with regard to a narrative, then requires more than the glacially
slow movements of geological time, less than the temporary transience of a migrant -- but certainly somewhere in between.

In some ways this intersticial temporality is of our own, culturally specific construction.

It had become a different world yet again.
Previous constructs of togetherness and separateness had been renegotiated.
Neighbors need not be neighbors since proximity itself was to be addressed
in terms of coincidence – something it
had always been anyway, just on a different scale.

As had happened before, space and time shed and morphed into familiar yet distinctly unproven spirits; constructs of a mind that is part of a larger community; humanity.

In a not too distant reality that places increasingly less stock in material wealth - the attendant issues of security, maintenance, and familial obligation having become too burdensome to bother with - a mobile, discrete, and almost anonymous aesthetic is under continuous development -- not exclusively functional, not exclusively disposable, not exclusively for any individual.

The wealth of the individual resides in the cloud of an electronic ether.