Get LAWUN [Locally Available World Unseen Networks] onto your lawn –

Could the whole world be an all-green-grass-sphere?

If you had a quiet chuckle over Electronic Tomato or Manzak then take a fast look under your bed or your better-than-real-leather Naugahyde chair and check that MOWBOT isn’t sleeping there, purring like some overloved kitten waiting to chew up your carpet when you go out the door. This is the mower that sleeps in the shed. You groove away in the rose-bed while the lawn-mower-with-the-brain makes out in the grass of your own back door great yonder.

Mowbot has no appetite for flowers, plants, shrubs, etc; while it completes its grass-cutting chores you may now potter in the garden with no concern for the safety of your flowerbeds – any time of the day or night. The real point is it’s available, it’s on the market; mow now pay later.

Nowhere is safe from unseen signals and like all your enemies it is far better to embrace them as your friend and learn to live rather than cry morality or history. Get your local authority to electrify their park and give the gardeners time to tend the blossoms and cover the cities with geraniums. Take a look at Mowbot: is it a freak? ... another natty gadget? Can you be sure a Fridgebot won’t be marketed tomorrow, or a Bed-bot, Housebot, all ready and responsive to Lawun, and everyone knowing about Lawun and it being all over and calling up your bots from some kind of a scene in the forest glades and setting up your village without moving? Don’t move, it’ll come to you.

DEFINITION: A Bottery is a fully serviced natural landscape.

1. The picture of this man by the river collects together most of the images and influences that produced this project – the transient non-specialised environment made possible by the development of sophisticated portable hardware.
Here he is sitting with his TV, ice box, car behind him, all neat, got his own scene going for him, and yet it can all be taken away, and when it’s gone there’s nothing to show that it was there at all, except a small amount of crushed grass and perhaps a tyre track, a footprint. So it’s all invisible in a way. The temporary place, retained perhaps permanently in the memory. An architecture that exists only with reference to time.
It’s funny that for some years now time has been an important influence in the ‘arts’; that is, except in architecture. (Apart from nominal and superficial concessions to ‘movement’ and ‘communications’.) Perhaps architects knew all along that if they came to grips with time they would be right out of a job.

2. I have a desire for
The built environment
To allow me to do
My own thing.

More and more people want to determine their own parameters of behaviour. They want to decide how they shall behave, whether it’s playing, working, loving, etc. People are less and less prepared to accept imposed rules and patterns of behaviour. Doing your own thing is important.
... people are becoming more interested in people and reality, rather than in feeding mythical systems.
Unfortunately, however, in terms of doing your own thing, architecture is clearly not working. It is important to note that all the trends in society and technology are searching for flexibility and versatility. Specialisation is dead. In the building world the idea of the multi-purpose shed pays lip-service to this observation; the idea of non-specialised systems and architecture begin to interact: the place that jumps, the boat that walks, the tie that is a pen.
The idea of rooms for specific purposes is not viable any more – that’s obvious, even before you ask whether rooms are viable any more. Everything is all mixed up, it’s all fragmented.
That is, except for architects, who still seem to think that building types exist and that it’s useful to give ‘rooms’ specific purposes on their drawings.

3. I have a desire for the environment to be invisible in order that I may be free from the pornography known as buildings …
One of the most interesting observables for the architect about some recent ‘sculpture’ (if it exists) is that it takes great care not to disturb the existing environment and in fact draws from its situation and feeds on all the on-going events and processes that any particular site contains.
… using the untapped energy and information network of the day-to-day environment. (Jack Burnham)
The common threads that exist between the fisherman and his Sony and the project above. Robert Smithson’s ‘Incidents of mirror travel in the Yucatan’ are important.
Both involve the temporary placing of bits of hardware in the natural scene and their ultimate removal; about this project Smithson writes: ‘It is the dimension of absence that is to be found.’ So maybe you might say that the development of portable hardware produces an architecture of absence. You’ve got to know about when it’s not there as well as when it’s there.

4. Cowboy international nomad hero.
It used to seem a nice idea to carry your environment around with you (spaceman, cushicle, suitaloon, etc), but it can be as much of a drag as having it stuck in one place. The cowboy was probably one of the most successful carriers of his own environment because his hardware needs were low (mug, saddle, bedroll, matches) and because his prime mover, horse, selected its own fuel and was a fairly efficient animal robot. The ranch was his oasis, his base. The modern nomad needs sophisticated servicing. Howard Johnson understands this; and in the Bottery this is achieved by the technique of calling it up wherever you are, it’s delivered by robots. It’s anarchy – and it’s hardware supported until it’s under the skin or in the mind.

5. Marshall McLuhan has said that planet earth can be understood now as a piece of sculpture in the galaxies. The Bottery is part of the idea of the Spacepark Earth (write to Sierra Club Foundation, Mill Tower, San Francisco, California 94101 for further information).

6. Keymatic (purchasable), is a familiar piece of hardware, part of a long line of crude domestic robots, dishwasher, mixer, central heating, etc. The thing about keymatic that’s nice is the system of programming, which is done by a plastic plate. It is interesting to compare the image of keymatic to much recent cooker design which has jet-fighter cockpit aesthetic. The kitchen robot has become, in keymatic, not a vast piece of technical iconery, but an anonymous box and slot into which you place your programme. Every house now contains crude robots. Everybody wants a house full of robots but no one wants to look like a house full of robots, so why not forget about the house and have a garden, and a collection of robots.

7. This is the diagram of L.A.W.U.N. This project is about calling it all up wherever you are (Environmental anarchy). A Bottery is a robot-serviced landscape. This project is about the setting up of an experimental Bottery used solely by pedestrians for the purposes of (a) studying the nature and operation of the bot/man relationship (b) the development of reliable and efficient bot systems.

[…]

8. For hardware lovers: a selection of electric aids to natural growth to help the gardener in the world park. Also a diagram of a cross-section of a Skinbot. The basic bot consists of a primary frame, a power module and an exchange unit. On to this are clipped combinations of modules for various performance requirements. Compatibility is assured by the exchange unit, which rejects any mismatched modules.

9. Mowbot (purchasable), like Keymatic, is easy, no sweat: set the grass cutting height on the dial and it will sense when the grass is needing a trim, you don’t need to worry. And it’s anonymous, and it’s invisible, it’s not a piece of permanent lawn furniture. It’s still a fairly crude robot however, because you will still need a hard network of wires embedded under the ground at the perimeter of its territory. It has to be a very short step from having just Mowbot to having a shed full of bots and then all you would need would be a shed, and a lawn.

10. Firebot is a piece of experimental hardware, a heat-sensitive bot, homing in to do its own thing. Developed by Professor Thring at Sheffield. (Who said sleepbot, the deliverer of slumbermatic comforts to the needy body and mind, was an absurd idea?)

11. Bot base module for maintenance, storage, etc. They are contained within prefabricated plastic shells designed to blend in with the local scene.

12. Picnic Groove (dressed) somewhere in the world park. Skinbot delivers 18 cubic metres of air-conditioned deformable space, enclosed by a Sunfilta gossamer membrane that can glow at night by voice command and whose opacity is infinitely variable to choice. Combot brings to your side out of the bluebells a way into your own secret mind, or selects out of the world’s transmitted invisible pictures and sounds your own pattern of information and shows it on your shirt or on a screen. This is a brief community of people gathered together in the world park. They have called up their bots. The gathering is only related to time. Tomorrow, in half an hour, next week, it will all have changed, there’ll be nothing remaining to indicate that it was there. The natural scene will remain unchanged. This small instant village will only exist in the memories of the people that were there and in the information memory of the robot. An invisible village. An architecture existing only in time.

13. This couple, still living in their nice house turn on with Combot in the evenings. However, they are already wondering why they need any furniture and have their Combot networked into their office in town and don’t need to commute any more.

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].