Les photos ci-dessus sont extraites de la série Prefab Indiana réalisée par l'architecte Wes Janz. Voilà comment il présente son travail dans la revue Polar Inertia.
"Prefabricated houses roll south, 70 miles per hour, on I-69. I daydream north, 13+ years, 70 miles per hour, on I-69 between my Indianapolis home near Exit 0 to Exit 41 and work at Ball State University.
The prefabs are sourced in northern Indiana, in places like Elkhart – the “RV Capital of the World” – were one manufacturer, Skyline, built 890,000 houses since 1951. The city of Middlebury is there too, and so are places with fun names: Goshen, Wakarusa, Nappanee, Shipshewana.
About the photos. Inspired by Chris Jones’ “St Ives by chance” and “chance process” work, and John Cage’s musical composition 4’33”. A house approaches, camera up, viewfinder look, shutter push, then gone. Three seconds. Converging high speeds, closeness, and one-eye-on-prefab-one-eye-on-traffic bring blurs and out-of-frame experiences. Houses are backgrounded as overpasses, yellow lines, asphalt, guardrails, vehicles, dirty windshield, weather, changing seasonal landscapes, signage, and traffic accidents come into view. January to July 2009.
Prefabricated houses keep rolling, their mobility reflecting our confident choices in the best of times, tagging along now with the contradictory and complementary forces of foreclosing, vacating, and on-the-moving of our unsettling and resettling lives."
En découvrant ce travail récemment je n'ai pas pu m'empêcher de faire le lien avec le projet "HOMEWAY - The Great Suburban Exodus" par Terreform qui se présente comme, je cite, "ecological design group for urban infrastructure, building, planning, and art".
HOMEWAY est, en effet, selon moi, le prolongement prospectif de ce que montre Wes Janz, doublé d'une réflexion sur le développement de la suburbia.
"How can our cities extend into the suburbs sustainability ? We propose to put our future American dwellings on wheels. These retrofitted houses will flock towards downtown city cores and back. We intended to reinforce our existing highways between cities with an intelligent renewable infrastructure. Therefore our homes will be enabled to flow continuously from urban core to core.
Our proposal envisions an immense and vital solution to a fundamental problem: American suburbs fail to work efficiently. In the next 25 years we will build 56 million new homes that will consume 18.8 million acres of virgin land and emit 7.3 billion tons of CO2 per year.
These frameworks of development need to be rethought to meet our ecological carrying capacities. Why should we put further energy into past inferior patterns? America needs to deliver dwellings closer to our existing main infrastructural arteries. We cannot continue to overextend our thinly disturbed resource lines."
"America has always been a nation on the road. We desire to move the suburbs on smart networked wheels. We intend to affix a diverse range of mobility mechanisms to home units that generate our novel HOMEWAY system. In the future, the physical home will remain permanent but its location will be transient.
Our static suburbs will be transformed into a dynamic and deployable flow.
Houses will have the option to switch from parked to low speed. Homes, big box retail, movie theaters, supermarkets, business hubs, food production, and power plants will depart from their existing sprawled communities and line up along highways to create a truly breathing interconnected metabolic urbanism. Dense ribbons of food, energy, waste and water elements will follow the direction of moving population clusters."
Et en maquette, cela donne cela.
On retrouve là l'esprit de la walking city d'Archigram enrichi des délires de Steven M. Johnson et des visions des Mange-Bitume.
