Mechanization generated many new systems, materials and methods in architecture. From modernism to high-tech architecture, the systemic use of technology as a response to any problem or the representation of newness expressed by the machine aesthetic underlined industrial manifestations in architectural design. Machines and devices became part of design’s theorisation of utopias or dystopias. Archigram's walking city is the case and point of architecture becoming a machine capable of constructing, developing and displacing cities; a depiction of technology taking over urbanity. This vision of an a-contextual architecture where a machine could build or rebuild a globalized habitat in any setting challenged the regional vision of architecture and the classic canon of architecture relating to its site as the fundamental aspect of its composition. Mechanisms for dwelling were imagined in exigent times, reacting to the second world war, the cold war and the arm's race with the invention of the H bomb. Machines would help control climate and environments in a potentially inhospitable war-torn planet.
Today's challenges while equally geopolitical and certainly increasingly environmental are the focal point of extensive exploration in the area of moveable dwellings; being able to set up house anywhere and self-sufficiently are two themes that are driving this research. The Walking House (2009) designed by N55 combines the microdwelling with a reaffirmation that mechanisation of architecture could lead to moveable housing and that technology could make this type of dwelling sustainable. The walking house is a mobile unit: an octahedron or hexagonal based prism placed on one of its surfaces and lifted off the ground by steel trusses made up of six spider like steel hydraulic limbs that propel the volume forward at a maximum speed of 1 meter per minute. The basic structure is made of timber panels. The unit harvests solar and wind energy and has the potential to collect rain-water. A wood burning stove and composting toilet complete the modules basic living systems. The Walking House, like Archigram's walking, city is not dependent on the existence of a collective infrastructure or network but can move around according to its inhabitant’s nomadic lifestyle over any type of field or earthwork.
The Walking House by N55
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