An ability to dream up next year’s architectural modes relies not 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 mechanised society as drive-in cinemas, mobile homes, gadgetry, cars that can turn themselves into caravans or boats, supermarket doors that can 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[itional] 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 up 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 this 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 lavatories could become fixed service units, with the living areas made up of parts which, by means of folding panels, could divide up to form mobile containers which could 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 things such as armchairs and tables are inflatable so that with varying air pressures they can be converted into a car 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 30 mobile containers might gather around a unit to form a big space.

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 … […]

When you start thinking about the pros and cons of the idea of the Auto Environment, you realise 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. S

tage two in the development of the 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 8 feet wide and 30 feet long (two put side by side make 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 micro version 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 realised 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 organised, 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 a clothing skin 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 bodiless 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

The project is a preliminary study in the design of automated instructional, 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 an instructional 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.

Diagram 1


This diagram shows the automatic casting plant on the left, with the finished units being conveyed to their position. It is assumed at this stage that there will be three basic types of casting plant:
Plant I

producing components of a main supporting structure, possibly a structure based on Fullers "Aspersion Tensegrity", whereby a standard tensegrity structure will erect itself in the air by tensioning its outer edges. This structure would form a transparent, weather resistant skin to the interior spaces of the building.
Plant II

producing components for floor space. Plant III
producing servicing units - see diagrams 2, 3 and 4.

Diagram 2


This diagram is an idea for a dwelling unit.

Diagrams 2, 3 and 4


These diagrams show the folded units in diagram 1 opened out to form a dwelling unit on one level and measuring 400 sq. ft. (Plant II). The area can be increased/decreased by the addition/subtraction of extra units, e.g. if mother-in-law descends on the family for a month, extra panels can be ordered from stock.

Around the edge are placed service units which can be moved or renewed - kitchen, bathroom, cloaks, wardrobe, study deck, etc. (Plant III). The dwelling unit is subdivided into rooms by means of panels 4" wide, 40" long and 100" high, which can pivot at both ends thus becoming a door as well as a space divider.

Why is there this apparent wastage of space in the traditional house? - for the bedrooms often occupy a greater area than the living and dining rooms, and in the daytime the bedrooms lie empty and at nighttime the living room is empty. The partitioning of daytime usage rooms in the traditional home allows no adaptation for party giving, quiet study, etc., because: • many people consider it unhealthy to sleep in the same room as you have been living in but do 
not know about our changes;

b) double beds fill the room leaving a useless 'U' shape.
c) small articles peculiar to bedrooms left lying around owing to antiquated storage systems.
This dwelling unit space can be created to fit round the intended activity merely by swinging panels into a pre-arranged pattern. Beds can be either folded up into a panel or situated under a floor panel. The space can be void with panels stacked round the outside (Diagram 2) or arranged in varying ways to form rooms (Diagrams 3 and 4).
The dwelling unit may use the Plant 1 main structure for its cladding (with openable glass panels placed in the tension network).

Dennis Crompton and PH