here’s a project that plays with the idea of “space” and “mobility” on a “big moving scale.”
andrew manynard has been designing clever, (some) eco-friendly buildings such as Essex Street House in Melbourne. Corb v2.0 is another example of his creative thinking.

orginal image from here

This is the idea behind corb v2.0:

Every wanted to live in the penthouse every now and then? Want to get away from your annoying neighbour with the big stereo and bad music taste? Want to have a party without disturbing others? You want a different view every now and then? Corb V2.0 gives you the opportunity … Corb V2.0 takes well-designed apartments [rather than badly scaled containers] and uses modern infrastructure to deal with the areas where apartment blocks fail, ie social hierarchy and lack of adaptability or responsiveness. Through the mobility afforded by shipping equipment, the utopian ideal is once more subverted back to a houseing solution, which Corbusier dreamt of back in ‘23.

basially, there’s a machine that shifts the location of each apartment (container) either randomly or on programmed path. maynard envisages the destruction and restruction of social heirarchy, culture, and environment - intangible reality - in which we live through physical movement of what’s tangible, or tangible reality. what a brilliant idea. this particular project has been criticised heavily on its originality (or lack of). Yes, it’s true that there has been a very similar project by lot-ekcalled MDU (mobile dwelling unit), but if you look closely enough, you can see that corbv2.0 shows more considerations to the social and aesthetic aspects of living - two particularly emphasised realms of contemporary society.

additional cool pictures here:

it’s interesting to see increasing academic and commercial attention to “space” - definition, construction, manipulation, and shifting of it. it’s not just about “wow, look what we can do with all these technologies to ‘create’ and ‘access’ different spaces through different times!” but rather, it’s more of a mutual interaction and interplay of these two. it appears to follow the history of the big technological and social determinism debate since the beginning of the internet era. the urban tapestries project is a good example, linking what’s spatial - both physical and virtual - with the mobile.

quite possibly the time of static spatiality is over. locomotion is over - sorry, kylie - because everybody’s doin’ a brand new dance now: we’re moving from the “spaces” to the “space” in which every entity shifts around, and in and out of micro “sections” or “modules” fluidly. there’s no stopping to and in this. it’s getting closer to the core concept of buddhism: no attachment … with a but.

“no attachment - including time and space - but your mobile unit (phone for now, perhaps).”
interesting times now and ahead.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 4:43 pm and is filed under design, urban. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.