Cushicle/Suitaloon

Abstract

An invitation from the editors of the JAE to revisit a project executed over fifty years ago may reflect a nostalgia for an imagined golden age when architects, in truth just a handful, dedicated themselves to the wholesale rethinking of the built environment. For this happy few the prospect of servitude in an architect's office endlessly reworking the client-funded classic one-off building did not exactly inspire; so, armed with a conviction that change needed to happen on the scale of the city, they coalesced into groups like Archigram to produce the clientless Plug-in City, Walking City, Instant City, Living City, Dream City and Rok Plug/Log Plug. All of them unrealizable except perhaps for Instant City, which was a sort of modernized traveling circus. And in 1969 Instant City actually happened when a cow pasture in Bethel, NY turned into a city pop. 400,000 for four days at the end of which the cows got their pasture back.

My solo offering was the 1966 Cushicle/Suitaloon, a project whose genesis was a photograph I found of a man wearing a warm suit (manufactured, apparently, by the Frankenstein company[!]). Add an air cushion vehicle (abbreviated to Cushicle) type hovercraft, a few inflatables and some items from NASA and you were on the way to making a living environment…….or so went the hype.

The JAE-requested revisitation, as might be expected, changed the project¹ not so much in terms of its appearance but in the way it gets explained. It allowed the project to develop into a less gee whiz and more thoughtful study, I would like to believe, of the concentric skins surrounding us that help compensate for the fact that rarely is the local meteorology what you might call Garden-of-Eden quality—i.e. blue sky, temps. 80°F, humidity 52%, no bugs.²

Notes

1 In physics, the term observer effect refers to changes that the act of observation will make on the phenomenon being observed. This is often the result of measuring tools that, as a result of their normal functioning, alter the state of what they measure. A typical example is checking the pressure in an automobile tire; the very process of measuring the pressure involves the escape of some air from the tire, thus altering the pressure. The observer effect is often confused with Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

2 It can be claimed that if the Garden were truly Paradise then neither clothing nor architecture would be necessary, because what these presences in our modern world provide is the amelioration of nasty weather. So the notion of a house for Adam in Paradise is specious.

I suspect that A and E thought they were being expelled because God made it rain. He had no choice.

3 Philippe Piguet, Jérôme Sans, and Paul Virilio, Lucy Orta: Refuge Wear (Paris: Editions Jean-Michel Place).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Webb

Michael Webb studied architecture at the then Regent Street Polytechnic School of Architecture, taking somewhat longer to graduate than the five-year norm…a lot longer. In 1962 he became part of the Archigram group that Sir Peter Cook was then forming. Teaching, first in Virginia and then at the Cooper Union in New York, has supported the life long habit of churning out drawing after drawing…