Landscapes of Mobility

Culture, Politics, and Placemaking

Jennifer Johung, Arijit Sen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317108061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Our world is unquestionably one in which ubiquitous movements of people, goods, technologies, media, money, and ideas produce systems of flows. Comparing case studies from across the world, including those from Benin, the United States, India, Mali, Senegal, Japan, Haiti, and Romania, this book focuses on quotidian landscapes of mobility. Despite their seemingly familiar and innocuous appearances, these spaces exert tremendous control over our behavior and activities. By examining and mapping the politics of place and motion, this book analyzes human beings' embodied engagements with their built world and provides diverse perspectives on the ideological and political underpinnings of landscapes of mobility. In order to describe landscapes of mobility as a historically, socially, and politically constructed condition, the book is divided into three sections-objects, contacts, and flows. The first section looks at elements that constitute such landscapes, including mobile bodies, buildings, and practices across multiple geographical scales. As these variable landscapes are reconstituted under particular social, economic, ecological, and political conditions, the second section turns to the particular practices that catalyze embodied relations within and across such spaces. Finally, the last section explores how the flows of objects, bodies, interactions, and ecologies are represented, presenting a critical comparison of the means by which relations, processes, and exchanges are captured, depicted, reproduced and re-embodied.

PART I
Objects

1
Replaceable Skins: Clothing as Mobile Home

Jennifer Johung

A portable sack, carried on the back of its owner and always ready to be unfolded, can be transformed into a pliable membrane that skirts the surface of the body, now encased in a temporary cocoon-like home. So envisioned Michael Webb, a founding member of the British experimental architecture collective, Archigram, in 1966. Unconvinced that volumetric solidity should be the material foundation of building practices, Archigram turned to the architectural potential of adaptable forms and fluid networks that extended the built site “beyond architecture,” as the title of one of their newsletters announced (Sadler 2005). Beyond architecture, Webb imagined an environment of dematerialized transience where his expandable “Cushicle” sack and inflatable “Suitaloon” membrane would replace the static and solid built structure with the organic form of skin. “Skin,” another Archigram member Peter Cook contended, “can be treated as an environmental totality” (Sadler 2005: 113). While remaining a proposal diagrammed on paper, Webb’s “Cushicle/Suitaloon” nonetheless challenged the material foundation of modern architectural organicism, suggesting that the biological form and networked system of a body could literally take the place of a built site.

Recent interdisciplinary explorations across architecture, art and fashion design have now begun to revisit Archigram’s proposals, re-materializing a second skin that replaces the body’s vulnerable surface and reshapes the nomadic body into a portable home. As architecture, protective garment-shelters operate modularly. Quickly-produced, pre-fabricated, yet variable component parts connect and reconnect to a unified framework, activating a housing system that can afford temporarily situated, socially outcast or continuously homeless individuals both physical protection and the ability to form communities. While the dematerialized Archigram proposals of the 1960s pushed architecture towards the disappearance of solid structures and towards a permeable skin, material forms of shelter are nonetheless required and desired by those without access to any kind of housing structure. When a nomadic spatial experience is forced upon bodies unmoored from the social infrastructures that are meant to provide physical protection and the potential for belonging, body architecture offers material relief in the form of immediately usable garment-like shelter.

Yet this very same architecture can also visually confront those exclusionary housing systems and communities that render certain bodies socially illegible. In tandem with the transformation from garment to shelter is the body’s transition between invisible and visible forms, a process that is always partial and incomplete. As a second skin, this kind of architecture is always changing, developing, extending and retracting, as the wearer’s body visibly morphs into something like a built site and as that body-as-site reconstructs temporary community formations, in the very face of its forced dislocations and independent means of mobility. In fact, rather than revealing the specific attributes of the individual wearer, these shelters make visible the effacement of the larger social body to which that individual belongs and has been categorized, whether as refugee or as homeless, along with making legible the elitist housing systems, discriminating communities and public spheres that render certain categories of bodies socially invisible. Body architecture, therefore, has the potential to actively confront the mass effacement of its wearers, providing the material foundation for activist resistance as individual wearers cohere against a shared social anonymity. Protectively re-skinning each wearer as part of a collective, second skins thus offer outcast nomadic bodies alternative modes of visually intervening into their spatial environment. Protectively re-skinning each wearer as part of a commonly defined collective, the garments thus afford the possibility of publically situating their wearers in spaces that have conventionally predetermined them as socially illegible, and thus unable to or disallowed from accessing the cultural, economic and political infrastructures afforded to many others.

As much as garment-shelters activate a very public call for social visibility and legibility, collective action afforded by those garments in the public sphere must also be approached with caution. Indeed, the negotiation between the autonomy of individual mobility and the dependence on structures and systems of social formation must be conceived of as necessarily unstable. In fact, intervention, much less reintegration, into already present modes of being and belonging at home is not always viable and certainly never consistent. For in order to initiate the process of collective resistance against existing social-spatial conditions and to propose new frameworks for publically accessible housing, we must recognize the means by which such collectives are formed, by whom and against whom, potentially resulting in what kind of coherent formation with what kind of force. Body architecture challenges us to not turn our eyes away, not to ignore, but rather to see the ongoing social and spatial displacement of certain bodies as well as the modes through which collective action becomes possible for some and not for others. Yet however temporarily or unevenly, such structures and their methods of community formation attempt to visibly and publically contextualize, resituate, and re-house those who are not systematically afforded the materials and methods of belonging in place.

In Spring/Summer 2000, C. P. Company, an Italian-based sportswear company established in 1975, introduced a “Transformables” range of outerwear. Designed by Moreno Ferrari, its main pieces are individual, portable, wearable membranes that recall those imagined by Archigram. In contrast to both conventionally solid architectural materials and organic, untreated and delicate fabrics, C. P. Company’s ongoing textile research continually aims to develop new technologies that industrially approximate the flexible, porous yet durable and weather-proof dimensions of human skin. In the company’s “Transformables” collection, an orange parka, made from waterproof polyurethane, transforms into a lightweight sleeping bag as the wearer unfurls a shoulder bag and zips it around his body. Another piece, a long-hooded, poncho-shaped coat, unfolds to become a “metropolitan igloo tent” structured out of aluminum rods and wind- and rain-proof translucent, rubberized nylon mesh. The following year, in their Spring/Summer 2001 collection, the company extended their “Transformables” line, adding a polyurethane parka that inflates into an armchair, a glazed transparent PVC waistcoat that doubles as a cushion, and a long blue polyurethane jacket with detachable layers that inflates into a one-person mattress encased inside a nylon mesh tent. These multi-functional transformations operate modularly through material replacements that are never finalized and are always in process of completion. Layers, linings, design features and fastenings detach and reattach, reforming the flexible, protective industrial textiles into structural surfaces and shapes that can, in turn, be refigured by interchanging and rearranging component parts.

Transformable clothing, fashion historian Bradley Quinn (2002: 120) has suggested, “hangs in limbo somewhere between Deconstruction and Reconstruction.” Appropriated from architecture, deconstruction in fashion design articulates a process of taking apart and rearranging panels, pieces, layers, and fastenings and putting them back together in order to make visible the garment’s construction. Reconstruction, on the other hand, as defined by Quinn (2002: 130), characterizes garments that “appear to be in mid-manufacture. Like deconstruction, the process of construction is highlighted, but the emphasis is on completing the process rather than destroying it.” Transformable clothing thus mediates between these deconstructive and reconstructive tendencies, according to a system of partial and incomplete replacement. Two or more designs are structurally encapsulated in one, while devices like zips, snaps, concealed air pumps or metal rods allow the garment to come together and apart in varying configurations. Each transformation is designed as a potential form, conflated within other possible forms and respective functions, to be temporarily assembled and replaced by each wearer in response to her particular and variable needs.

Although C.P. Company’s experimentations with the design and structuring of their “Transformables” line provides a starting point from which to consider transformable clothing’s potential as replaceable shelter, the company’s integration of self-sufficiency and mobility in an individual garment design meets the requirements of only one particular kind of user. C. P. Company’s self-imagined client is “the dynamic, urban, educated” modern-day, gender-unspecific, economically-sound nomad who may have access to permanent housing structures, but chooses a transient way of life in which on-the-spot decisions to move or stay can be flexibly accommodated. Alternately deconstructing or reconstructing components of their garments into and out of protective membranes that provide comfortable places to pause, these so-called “urban nomads” are granted the agency of transformation and the luxury of choosing a mobile lifestyle that may seem impossible for others.

Transformable clothing must therefore also acknowledge the forced mobility of other kinds of nomads who have no choice but to seek refuge in the very fabrics that cover their bodies. Acknowledging these kinds of potential wearers, the London-based Cyprus-born Hussein Chalayan addresses the forced migration of bodies within the field of haute couture fashion. Chalayan’s fashion designs and shows attest to the growing phenomenon of global dispersions through his re-imagination of individual garments as portable architecture. As Caroline Evans (2005: 12) proposes in the exhibition catalogue to Chalayan’s 2005 retrospective at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands: “The theme of travel so prevalent in Chalayan’s work can be understood, both literally and figuratively, as a journey of alienation and loss, as much as it is one of self-discovery and self-fashioning.” For Chalayan, the temporary spatial situation of the mobile body within a built environment to which it does not belong is always precarious. Chalayan’s designs respond to this precariousness by continuously rematerializing a connection, however vulnerable, between the clothed body and each new site.

Occurring around the same time as photographs from the war in Kosovo were heavily disseminated through the various news media, Chalayan’s Autumn/Winter 2000 show, Afterwords, centered on the concept of fleeing of one’s home during a time of war. Chalayan opened his show with the entrance of a family whose dresses and shirts slowly turned into cloaks that completely covered their bodies. They sat, facing the audience, on wooden stools upon a white stage and in front of a round coffee table surrounded by four other chairs. At the end of the show, after Chalayan had sent models down the stage in a manner more typical of a fashion show, a transformation of the set began to take place. Dressed in under-slips, four women removed the covers from the chairs and put them onto their bodies as dresses. Once clothed, they folded up the chairs into suitcases. Another woman then stepped into the center of the coffee table and raised it up to her waist to form a conically layered, wooden skirt. With each of the furniture pieces packed up or worn as garments, the women departed and the lights went down on the empty white stage.

Translating modes of flight into the design and use of his clothing, Chalayan offers the potential for familiar settings to be replaced in new locales, in support of those who must carry their possessions and indeed what they can of their homes with them. This process of replacement is initiated through the modular operation of Chalayan’s garments, whose parts can come together and apart to continuously reform a unified spatial situation in any given site. Covering the skin, they frame a body that is vulnerable, threatened, out of place. Yet the activation of these variable garments by those wearing them affords the wearer the choice to take part of their homes with them. Quinn (2002: 29) notes that “they transported the garments by bringing them into contact with the body, rescuing them as one would carry a child to safety.” The garments both protect and are protected by the body, as formidable enhancements of the skin, as well as hidden objects and structures. As transformable clothing and as wearable architectural sites, Chalayan’s garments are both structurally solid and permeable, both furniture and second skin, both a room and a collection of bodies housed there. His designs therefore not only negotiate between migration and situation, but they also attest to the necessary and partial invisibility of those sites in which certain bodies may momentarily belong, and for whom home is an unsafe and ever-moving place.

As sites of belonging start to become accessible while also remaining somewhat hidden, the bodies clothed in and as such sites also oscillate between invisible and visible presences within an oftentimes unforgiving and unwelcoming spatial environment. For London-based design duo Adam Thorpe and Joe Hunter of Vexed Generation, the rise in urban surveillance systems in the 1990s inspired their construction of garments that zip up to cover most of the head and face, leaving only the eye area open and visible. Using breathable, bullet- and slash-proof textiles like Kevlar and ballistic nylon that were initially developed to protect military officers against high energy or projectile impacts, Vexed Generation created defensive “urban armor” in defiance of the British government’s restrictions on civil liberties. By introducing garments like their “Vexed Parka” and their “Techtonic Jacket,” Thorpe and Hunter were directly responding to the 1994 British Criminal Justice Act, which created a new category of offenses meant to limit or outright ban public gatherings and demonstrations. A wearer could put on one of these parkas, zip it up to the eyes and over the head, and be almost unidentifiable, while remaining even more menacingly and publicly present.

By hiding facial features and encasing the body in heavily protective, gender-unspecific outerwear, Vexed Generation differentiates between visual anonymity and visibility. Thorpe continues to explain that the garments “give people enough protection for them to be able to go out and be active, more involved with their environment in a secure fashion” (Quinn 2002: 67). Anonymity need not counteract visibility; the garments do not act as camouflage. Instead, the transformation from visible to invisible remains incomplete. The parka an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Landscapes of Mobility: Culture, Politics, and Placemaking
• PART I OBJECTS
• PART II CONTACTS
• PART III FLOWS
• Index