Mobility in architecture can be accomplished and perceived in many different ways. The open plan and the separation of structure and skin allowed for free flowing organizations to develop and reform classical planning. The mobile home built on a wheeled chassis expressed another type of freedom and a willingness to bridge automobile and housing production. Someone could live anywhere and move their dwelling according to social, economic or political reasons. More complex and even utopian versions of mobility include Pier-Luigi Nervi’s rotating house, the circular plan built in reinforced concrete was attached to rotating rollers producing a revolving machine for living, or Bucky Fuller’s standard of living package, which included all the essentials for setting up a dwelling in any context.
Mobility as a theme in architecture benefits from a rich corpus of exploration, which now includes a self-building dwelling machine. Ten Fold engineering, a UK company, has developed a self-deployable structure that conceptually combines the mobile home, the high-tech machinery of Nervi’s rotating house with Fuller’s standard of living package to produce MY SPACE; a machine that unfolds as a type of crane to produce a fully furnished living. Founded by architect David Martyn in 2010, the dwelling is based on shipping container dimensions and could easily be stacked and transported massively to any location. The internal structural and mobile organs are a series of articulated levers expand into a lattice structure. Each lever pivots and pushes the dwelling components outward from the core to define the living space.
The company is marketing their technology for many uses and proposes the self-building dwelling for emergency situations. The U-Box, is a 645 square-foot mobile home structure that requires no foundations as it is set-up on plate anchors, similar to those used in heavy construction machinery. The anchors can adapt to any setting. The ideal of being able to move into a new home in minutes is certainly alluring and the capacity to mass-produce these dwellings could radically transform housing and construction in difficult conditions. Transported by truck, the machine can literally unload itself. A future where the house builds itself is certainly possible, its desirability is still open for discussion.
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| The expandable dwelling - From the company website |
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