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EVOLUTION OF THE MOBILE TYPOLOGY
"The Generic City is always founded by people on the move, poised to move on. This explains the insubstantiality of their foundations. Like the
flakes that are suddenly formed in a clear liquid by joining two chemical substances, eventually to accumulate in an uncertain heap on the bottom,
the collision or confluence of two migrations - Cuban emigres going north and Jewish retirees going south, for instance, both ultimately on their way someplace else - establishes, out of the blue, a settlement."
Rem Koolhaas, "Generic City," Sikkens Foundation, Sassenheim, November 1995, pg. 11.Portable building solutions in a fluctuating world are a response to a society which expands, contracts and shifts depending on its needs. Our current culture produces a wide variety of portable, relocatable, and demountable building types ranging from health care to educational and commercial facilities. The portable culture has roving access to blood donor stations, medical check-ups, libraries, banking and portable sanitary facilities. Through mobile deployment of these facilities
the infrastructure is expanded. The pre-fabricated mobile home, the metal Airstream trailer and the deployable Dymaxion House share the essential
traits of the early American box house dwellings: the portability, the frailty, the lightness of construction, the temporary quality, and the absence of a solid foundation. These dwellings offer an alternative and
possibly a solution for the inhabitants of the next millennium's new 'generic' landscape.
According to the Bible, over 4000 years ago Noah was called by God to build an ark which would be capable of transporting the natural world and its creatures to safety when the apocalypse struck. This may have been the first portable and relocatable structure whose purpose was self-sufficient housing.
From the Basque sheepherder tent/coat and Bedouin woven goat-hair 'blacktent' to Mongolian yurts and American Indian tipis, human ingenuity has created an astonishing array of portable dwellings. In mediaeval Europe mystery plays were performed as populist parables that related to Biblical stories. The plays were staged in demountable theaters called 'mansiones',
which were platforms or booths set up in the town market place, or sometimes in an existing building. Historic examples such as these describe
a preindustrial world which was not bound to place but possessed an ideology of itinerant and nomadic responses to permanence.
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