A city in storage, space on the run
Mobile Linear City (1991) is a ‘city’ in storage. It comprises six housing units telescoped together into a semi-trailer and hauled by a tractor. The whole then looks like a conventional lorry. Once parked, the city can be pulled out to its full length. Clad in corrugated sheet, each house has panels of different sizes that fold down from the wall into a table and bench, a bed and a rack. Separating the housing units are walls that may either be reflecting or translucent. Light enters through the steel grid floors. The last and smallest unit does duty as a community service centre and contains toilets, showers, a stove and a fridge.
This city is public; spectators can walk under the houses and look up through the floor unless occupants hide their homes with carpeting.
The bare, deliberately cold quality of this ‘city’, with not the slightest sense of intimacy, expresses Acconci’s ideas about public space. For him, public space is ’space on the run’, space that is slipping away from life. Here there is no place, and no need, for personal contact. In the age of viruses, the body has a shell to shield it from information and disease. Like a snail it carries its own house everywhere to protect itself. It visits places but never remains there.
Excerpted from Parasite Paradise, A Manifesto for Temporary Architecture and Flexible Urbanism
See also:
Revolution is Sneakier: Conversation with Vito Acconci, by Anne Barclay Morgan
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Annika Backlund’s The Citizen in Poetry
Life in the city with its diversity and character of constant movement, has inspired poets and novelists throughout the years, and lead to many portraits of cities in literature. The first poem, The City, by Constantine P.Cavafy, dates from the beginning of the 20th century and gives a fatalistic view of life as a city from where there is no escape. The second poem, The Cities Inside Us by Alberto Rios, written at the end of the same century, shows how our previous experiences are always present in our lives, and how language reflects those experiences. Finally, the poem Illusion by Dennis Charlebois, which can be said to represent cities in general but also that of the virtual “cities” on the internet, where people meet in the shape of an alias, a character or a representing figure.