The project is a preliminary study in the design of automated constructional, servicing and dismantling techniques applied to a large building development.
The building has been designed large enough to include its own component production units. these manufacture moulded reinforced plastic panels, which are conveyed, folded up, to their position in the structure and then open out to form usable floor space.
Plastics have been chosen in preference to steel as a constructional medium because the full advantages of on-site component production can be taken. In the case of plastics, transport consists of raw materials arriving at one of the ports and being, ideally, pumped through pipelines to the site production units.
In the case of steel, each member must be completed in the factory, which may be a great distance from the site.
Michael Webb
Archigram, Edited by Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron & Mike Webb, 1972 [reprinted New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999].
An ability to dream up next year's architectural modes doesn't rely only on a knowledge of what next year's materials will do for you (plastic skins that dissolve in the sunlight to reform again when it gets cold, buildings that can be brought to the site in a test tube and allowed to bud) but also on being able to see the meaning and significance behind such shrines of our mechanized society as drive-in cinemas, mobile homes, gadgetry, cars that can turn themselves into caravans or boats, supermarket doors that open as you walk up to them, U-haul trailers, etc. If you take the car, it can be a status-symbol, male-virility-object and what-have-you means of getting about that's fun to own and drive, but it can also be a mobile room which can plug itself into a drive-in bank and become extra floor area of that bank.
Trad versions of drive-in architectures can be broken down into two major parts: the service unit, where space is at a premium, stuffed to the lid with the mechanics of the kitchen, the chancel, office or cinema, serving hamburgers, God, money or films. A lavishly planned and styled consumer space, a restaurant, nave, banking hall or auditorium. But this consumer space is, of course, made up of a series of mobile human containers - cars.
Applying the principle to the house: the kitchen, bathroom and dressing area, since they are essentially 'work' areas and contain bulky, heavy equipment like refrigerators, baths, coolers, stoves, and w.c.s could become fixed service units, and the living areas be made up of parts which, by means of folding panels, could divide up to form mobile containers and be driven off.
This basic subdivision of function implies that living/sleeping space gadgetry such as TV, Hi-Fi, record player and shaver can slot back into the service unit and that such things as armchairs and tables be inflatable so that with varying air pressures they can be converted into cars or seats.
In a drive-in home the volume at any moment is directly proportional to the number of people in it; when the family is away at the seaside the house consists only of folded-up storage units; during a party as many as thirty mobile containers might gather around a unit to form a big space.
The implications of this are that, when drive-in homes are grouped together, either horizontally or vertically, as in slab or tower blocks, the permanent, fixed service units will be at variable distances from each other depending on the number of mobile containers present, since it would be excessively wasteful to design for the maximum pressure condition, i.e. it's Saturday night and everyone's having a party.
Since most people will use their mobile containers to travel round the block, when someone throws a party - like the folks at number D - they are going to need a lot of space to accommodate all the containers. Thus, when these same folks are on vacation, there's going to be an awful lot of free, expensive space around their service/family heirloom box.
So the structure has been designed to get bigger or smaller, depending on the size of the container population present. When a driver enters the perimeter of the block, he dials for the part he wants to get to, and the hydraulic apparatus-cum-structure opens a parking space as shown in the three phase diagram. [...]
The containers in this scheme are four feet high, but when plugging into a service unit, fold out to make an eight feet high room.
When you start thinking about the pros and cons of this idea, you realize life isn't quite so cut and dried as all that: when travelling to and from the lump of stationary equipment you like to call home, it's nice to use equipment that normally is part of the service units, like telephone, radio, cocktail cabinet, and TV if you're a passenger.
Stage two in the development idea seems to be for the mobile container to take along with it some of the services it formerly plugged into 'at home'. Then, theoretically, you could make a home wherever you chose to park the container, since you would have with you all the equipment necessary for survival, high-standard-of-living style.
Americans have this already to a certain extent with their mobile homes - which are like caravans but bigger and longer - usually about eight feet wide and thirty feet long (two put side by side makes a decent sized living room), but the floor area needed to serve them means that the overall container is an awkward and cumbersome object to lug around the country. If a microversion of the requisite service gadgetry could be devised, combined with a package structure that could reform itself to allow differing functions within the same basic space, the degree of mobility that mobile homes promise could be realized while retaining the space and aids to luxury living that conventional ground-based homes offer.
At this point some sceptic - which means nearly everyone - will ask, 'Why all this mobility kick anyway, why lug your house around with you?' And the answer is because we find it a solution to some of the inefficiencies present in the way our environment is organized; inefficiencies which will only be aggravated as Europe swings into the Space Age.
For example, the idea of the two-house family is spreading - a flat in the city in which people spend their working week and a weekend house by the sea or in the mountains, whose accommodation and equipment must necessarily duplicate that of the town flat. And, again, the car that carries you from city to seaside contains yet another set of identical equipment - usually the most luxurious of the three: hi-fi radio, Ford T-bird style tape recorder, heater, cooler, telephone, cocktail cabinet, naugahyde seats.
Going all basic and back to first principles you reach stage three: the only real difference between a house and the clothing you wear is one of size - your clothes form a one-man skin and your house will allow any number of people in it. Both are subject to changes of fashion and both cover up to differing extents one's indecencies - but it's interesting to compare how the skins that form the enclosure of a house are traditionally permanent while the clothing skins are removable/replaceable to suit any whim of climate, sexual fetish or what-have-you. But in principle an overcoat is a house/is a car when a motor's clipped on.
So a package structure has been designed to be deformable into a clothing skin.
The parts of the structure are:
The basic clothing skin that can be inflated to make a chaise-longue or further inflated to make a room. It consists of two layers, an opaque, thermal insulating skin and a transparent/part translucent external cover which, used separately or in conjunction with each other, offer varying degrees of protection against excessive heat, cold, damp, etc.
A short range bodyless vehicle, consisting of a tubular frame chassis floating on an air cushion. The owner's body becomes the body of the vehicle. Hence its rather Wellsian name, Cushicle.
The third part is in two sections: first a hotted-up service core node dispensing food, movies, medicine, shows - in short, approximating to a city type and arranged on a country-wide grid pattern; and second, a high-speed continuous moving belt system which would link together these nodal cores and to which the Cushicles would attach themselves, just like the piggyback idea on American railroads.
Michael Webb and
David Greene
Archigram, Edited by Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron & Mike Webb, 1972 [reprinted New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999].
