Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972)

Excerpt from The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat, p.66:

“To like ships is first and foremost to like a house, a superlative one since it is unremittingly closed, and not at all vague sailings into the unknown: a ship is a habitat before being a means of transport. And sure enough, all the ships in Jules Verne are perfectly cubby-holes, and the vastness of their circumnavigation further increases the bliss of their closure, the perfection of their inner humanity. The Nautilus is this regards is the most desirable of all caves: the enjoyment of being enclosed reaches its paroxysm when, from the bosom of this unbroken inwardness, it is possible to watch, through a large window-pane the outside vagueness of the waters, thus define, in a single act, the inside by means of its opposite.”

“In this mythology of seafaring, there is only one means to exorcise the possessive nature of the man on a ship; it is to eliminate the man and to leave the ship on its own. The ship is then no longer a box, a habitat, an object that is owned; it becomes a traveling eye, which comes close to the infinite; it constantly begets departures. The object that is the true opposite of Verne’s Nautilus is Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat, the boat which say ‘I’, freed from its concavity, can make man proceed from a psycho-analysis of the cave to a genuine poetics of explorations.”

Short movie clip, clever advertisement for people on the move!
moving image from a moving train...

Led by Ir. Kas Oosterhuis, from the ONL office, Oosterhuis_Lénárd, check the hyperbody research group of the Delft University of Technology!

(Following hypertexts on a website page a student sent me. Knew ONL... Had missed out on the HRG @ DUT)

At last, the traveling exhibit of the Vitra Design Museum, Living in Motion - Design and Architecture for Flexible Living will arrive in Boston from the 31.01.2006 to 07.05.2006 at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art). Mark your calendar(S)!!!

Excerpts from the Vitra website:

"However, any portrayal of the subject needs to take into account that the kind of mobile, adaptable dwellings proposed by architects, designers and engineers cannot often be divided up into such categories. Consequently, alongside an Asian houseboat and the transportable "NhEW" house by the OpenOffice/COPENHAGEN Office Group, which indissolubly melds the house with its furnishings, our exhibition "Living in Motion" shows a multitude of amazing hybrids, which appear to be neither furniture nor architecture, but some kind of furnitecture."

"Neither an historical survey nor a geographical one nor dividing the exhibition up into up architecture, furniture and miscellaneous objects seemed appropriate methods of structuring the subject in a meaningful and stimulating way. Instead, the exhibition divides up its exhibits according to their function or what they are capable of, i.e., into Transporting, Adapting, Combining, Assembling and Disassembling, Folding and Unfolding and finally Wearing and Carrying. Particularly suitable for saving space when storing large or heavy objects, especially for transportation purposes, the principle of assembly and disassembly investigates an Asian yurt, Kare Klint's "Colonial Chair" and Tony O'Neill's "Nesting Storage Unit". By contrast, modular buildings such as Wes Jones' "Package Housing System" or furniture such as Werner Aisslinger's shelving system for Magis tend to demonstrate the possibilities offered by collapsible living objects for flexible and creative use. Not least, the function of many of the works presented is to save space. Folding also saves space, but functions in a completely different way from disassembling. Parasols, umbrellas and partition screens from the Far East demonstrate how, without using tools and with comparatively little effort, unfolding can transform simple shapes into complex structures. Objects that can be rolled up or blown up follow a similar principle."

I thought I knew every single internet link on the topic!!! Please find this absolute must know about link, transit city : urban think tank!

First moblog ;-)

Friday December 16, 2005: presentation of my neo-nomad research to the Kinetic Architecture class taught by Kostas Terzidis (Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Fall Semester 2005)

This past summer, coming back from a visit to the FRAC Centre, Orléans, France, I had in my hands a leaflet concerning FOYERS, an exhibit by Sylvie Ungauer that had happened in 2002. A look at her website to find amongst other projects At Home and Habiter (check the video!), which singularly reminds me of the work of Lucy Orta

In July 2005, I was presenting to the Presidential Choice Panel entitled Mobile Geographies at the SASE conference. Here is below an extract of the presentation:

“In the age of mobilities, when technologies have invaded the privacy of homes, the territory, personal or communal, is fragmented, scattered, and linked. It has shrunk to the skin, or the skin-clothing as a matter of fact. If habitat is a matter of habit, it is also a matter of “habit” which mean in French “clothing”. [1] Interestingly, wearable computing technologies link people, skin-clothing boundaries and space in an interesting manner. For example, the Patrol project empowers the wearer while diminishing arising dangers of the physical environment, by anticipating and avoiding obstacles. [2] In this instance, the architecture of the space could not matter less for the roaming of the nomad-warrior. The wearer can travel almost anywhere. Thus it can be argued on one hand, that the architecture of the space itself acquires the certain roundness that Deleuze and Guattari write about. “Roundness exists only as a thresholds-affect (neither flat nor pointed), and as a limit process […]” [3] When avoiding obstacles, the wearer avoids edges, pass fluidly by them, never touching them. Thus the distance between the wearer and the space, creates a sort of cushion, giving a “vague identity” to the space in which the wearer travels.”

[1] For further discussion see:
Werner Blaser, Lars Müller, Habit-Habitat : Christa de Carouge (Lars Müller Publishers, 2001) and, Simard-Laflamme Carole, Habit, Habitat, Habitus (Trois-Rivières : Le Sabord, 2002)...

[2] The Patrol project of Thad Starner, Bernt Schiele, and Alex Penthland has been developed after a chasing game, Patrol, played by MIT students (then fast paced nomads). This game required to occult vision by placing a band on the eyes. “The gestures and actions in Patrol provided a relatively well defined language and goal structure in a very harsh ‘real-life’ sensing environment. As such, Patrol became a context-sensing project within itself,” which enabled the elaboration of a technology, small “body-mounted” camera integrated in hat and connected to an embedded computer. The technology as such was helpful in the anticipation of the wearer’s tasks for example, and his future needs. Understanding that such technology may well be used for the physically impaired to roam in harsh real environment, this weapon, which provides and enhanced awareness of the physical environment, also participates to the “repairing” of the body.
Thad Starner, Bernt Schiele, and Alex Pentland, Visual Contextual Awareness in Wearable Computing, Perceptual Computing, submitted to the International Symposium on Wearable Computing, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 19-20 October 1998, and available online:
http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/projects/wearable/papers.html

[3] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Excerpt from 1227: Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine; in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press, 1987)