The Dwelling Design has become another cardboard moving box, questioning and packing up the pieces of home. Between the design of a mobile dwelling on a Unimog Frame, and a landscape space cast into the floodplain, we’ve been exploring those agents that tie people and architecture to place. In the truck, a sense of place is boundless, always available out the front window. Its also protected and carried with you, a cozy bunk in the back. On site, the place is part of the very riverbed it sits on. Its exposed to the flood and the ice, robust enough to withstand the forces, but malleable enough to capture an impression of passing seasons.
All the parts of home are divided into either those that you carry on your back, the necessities for survival, and those that you return to, unlock, and let spill out into open space. For us, there would be a cistern, a cellar, a library, and a fire pit waiting in the flood plain for our return. But the design of the space left behind could incorporate all those personal nooks and collections one stashes away and comes back to, like the obscure ashtrays my Grandfather collected even though he never smoked, or the miniature spoons my Grandmother hung on the wall and never used.
The two halves of the home then start to take two approaches to a minimal existence. The truck takes its cues from survival and efficiency. The home is tailored to the mechanics of the vehicle, and to the everyday parts of living, compacted. Its design attempts to carve out every available space for storage, and then to leave spaces one can tuck them self away in. On the other hand, the site is minimal in the sense of defining space. It does not use walls or roofs, but instead it uses topography to form space. Platforms and benches for lounging, eating, and bathing, are cast into the riverbed. Flooding can flow over and around them, pooling in basins and streaming through gutters. In this minimal palette of edges and platforms, space is able to grow.
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