C. Chronological Framework

The examination of how long into time these architectures are framed builds a first background data for our understanding of the shapes, the materiality, and the structures in which nomads were able to move in space. A chronological framework of these instinctive architectures addresses profound questions of time and temporality across spaces and mobility. Their shape and scale are affected by their needs and customs.

The transitory constructions are essentially composed of natural, degradable resources (e.g., Branches, Young Shoots, Grass...) destined to be used for only a few days. In the form of small huts with circular plans, the screens are in harmony with their environment. The African Bushmen or the Australian Aborigines who live from hunting and gathering take shelter from the wind in these more intimate dwellings, when they are not gathered around the fire in the middle of the camp.24 The huts of the Pygmy people, with their woven branch structures covered with large leaves, imitate the bird that shapes its nest, according to the movements of its body. Although, it is known that the constructions of traditional cultures are designed more by the body, muscles, and their movements, than by the eye.25

24. Hadzabe Hut Building - Amazing Traditional House from Natural Materials. Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2LJDIhjXC4&ab_ channel=NomadArchitecture

25. Pallasmaa, Juhani (2010). Le regard des sens. Editor : Linteau. Translated by Mathilde Bellaigue. 110 p.

26. Jousse, Marcel. (1969). L’anthropologie du geste. Paris : Resma Edition. pp. 207. 395 p.

“Indeed, we know the world only through the gestures we inflict on it by receiving its presence. It is a kind of tragic duel, so to speak: the world invades us from all sides and we conquer the world with our actions. And then we throw our triple bilateralism into the cosmos. And this is the great mechanism of Sharing. There is the right and there is the left. There is the front and there is the back. There is the top and then there is the bottom and in the center there is a human who does the sharing. This is the setiform structured world with only our hands! The tri-fold hand, in a body that oscillates symmetrically. This is one of the things in the problem of knowledge.”26

Sheltering in different continent, through time & lifestyles

Hunter-gatherer

Nomadic hunting and gathering, following wild plants and game available in season, is the oldest method of human subsistence.

Pastoralists

Pastoralists raise, drive, or move with herds in patterns that normally avoid depleting pastures beyond their capacity to recover.

Itinerant

Itinerant nomads offer the skills of a craft or trade to the sedentary populations among whom they travel. They are the most common nomadic peoples in industrialized countries.

Towards the use of several weeks, the episodic dwellings are characterized by more sophisticated techniques. They have a much more consequent effect on the environment. The tribes hunt and fish, these men dig and use fire for their buildings and for burning on the land, an early form of agriculture.27 The Indian teepees evoke a more intimate relationship with technology and the use of new resources such as animal skins. Then, there is the cultivation and establishment of collective dwellings and hierarchical patterns within the more complex tribes; the Iroquois longhouses, the Wai Wai communal houses, the Inuit spiral igloos which can be grouped together.28

On the other hand, the Inuit tupiq in summer, demonstrates an increasingly adaptive technique and behavior that differs from the basic circular plan known until then. Building systems are evolving and progressing: the Piaroa collective house, which now has primary and then secondary structures, is evolving from a simple dome. Moreover, nomadic people evolve and move in all types of environments and terrains: this is the case of the Dayak tribes of Sarawak who live in longhouses on the water.29

Over a certain period, semi-nomadic communities settle somewhere for a long time, due to agricultural activities. The tribe sometimes owns the land,

27. Marcel Mazoyer : l’abattis-brûlis, une des premières formes d’agriculture. Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrNNarfaaE&ab_channel=TerrEthique

28. Découverte d’une maison longue iroquoienne par télédétection. Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZjV4hy5nq0&ab_channel=Forumenclips

29. Village Lifestyle in Iban Longhouse, Malaysia by Asiatravel.com. Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3xl1dvvdoM&ab_channel=AsiaTravelTV settles there for long months, sometimes for years, and cultivates it until the land lies fallow or even runs out, and leave in respect of cycles. Their habitat is semi-permanent. These dwellings, which can be found among the Masai, Kikuyu of Kenya, or the Navajos of North America, are generally built from rough local materials such as dried bricks, straws, or branches. It gives information on the shapes and the scale they were able to build based on the found materials conditions.

Today, modular shacks are used to house travelers, such as the Romani. Associations like Ava in France have found simple ways to accommodate them temporarily.30 This is indeed a social act, and as the architect Yona Friedman says, the social act is in fact the distribution of a stock that must be limited. The architecture of survival is, therefore, essentially a tool for survival. Friedman says that architecture, which has become a discipline, has forgotten its role as a tool and must rediscover it.31

Before being a tool, an object is a simple object, and casting it serves as a game at the start. One goes to the point where it falls, picks it up, and thus marks out one’s path. When you get up again, you become aware of the route you have taken, and you measure the distances. The scalable object then becomes the measuring tool of the first Nomad.

31.

3. Scale & Shape

3.1. Scale

Def: A set of numbers, amounts, used to measure or compare the level of something. (Cambridge) Here, the prototype is scalable because of the nature of its materials and the will to be suitable for the maximum of situations.

3.2. Shape

Def: The particular physical form or appearance of something. (Cambridge)

The trailer has its own scalable proportions, it has number of variations while following the same structural frame. The chronological framework depicts that the roof is the shelter and the ground gain again its natural function as a surface with respect to its variations.

3.3. A comparison

The architectural artifact is superimposed with architectures from different period, vehicles, and living elements. It amalgamates the ideas of proportions and the ideas of shapes (i.e., line, circle, the oblique) in plan and section. The dimensions given here are exacts, or generalization of minimal variable heights. 0

D. The Abandoned House

The Abandoned House is both the place that has lived and the place that takes its strongest expression stripped of its inhabitants, its families, its couples, or its widow. It is the ruins that will remain. A future promise. It is only itself, damaged. It is also its broken parts, its fractures that make it an incomplete piece inviting the Nomad to justly use, complete, or prolong the Abandoned House in time. It speaks about reuse, sustainable speculative cycles. The spirit of the Nomad makes it his or her own, it speaks to its body, it waits for the Nomad to use it in every possible way.

It is also a fascinating piece of interest for the many photographers that freeze in time these houses that have lived and become useless, isolated.32 Because we do not take care of them, the structure abandoned in time is deformed and may deform the urban landscape. They become wild, sometimes frightening by their precariousness, and melting into the nature that will invade them. They become the scene of unsanitary squat and will eventually collapse. The abandoned house is a place that observes the world go by. But it is also a project, a source of materials.33

It is not a place to welcome, it has already been.

It is part of the path; it is in motion since it is no longer what it was.

It creates time for the one who comes. These houses serve as another analogy of time and ownership, the last remaining ruins of a story, from which we move on. The question is to know how these abandoned houses could not be rehabilitated, nor restored, but serve as a corner, for rest certainly, but also as a device to remain in the dynamics of the path. It stays in the walk of the Nomad and its fluidity and serve the basic needs of material resources.

A bit like a rule: no comfort, but instability in what it gives and what it gets. These houses can be shelters themselves in the first place. The oblique is seen as this new ritual of motion. We can read them in their new diagonals, falling pieces, a new ramp that links the ground to the shelter, inspired by Claude Parent for whom:

“The oblique function does not begin anywhere and never ends. The ground of reference of the Earth is not an obstacle to its development since the ramp is the structural element that makes two spaces communicate in continuity while they are inscribed in different natures - water and earth, earth, and sky - without interruption of the nature of the support.”34

These houses would become devices in the making, of unstable nature, that the bodies espouse all the better in their movements. It is thus a question of understanding the structure of these giving houses to use them in the second place for the artifact, subtracting objects of passage, fabrics, tarps, wood, steel frames... It answers to a pragmatic incapacity to lodge but also to enunciate a new symbol in the act of giving, as a potential of movement and change. The abandoned house is at the beginning and at the end of motion. A premise for other and different uses, and at the end of its scenario and function. An incredible source of fascination.

4. Materiality

Def: A physical substance that things can be made from. (Cambridge)

Abandonned houses become the playground of mobile architecture. It starts by understanding the conditions of particular situations along the way and it leads a variety of scenarios, all unique in time and space.

On the right: System boundary diagram of harvesting wood and architectural salvage from a house.

E. The tent

When we talk about survival architecture, we of course think of makeshift shelters with rigid walls, mobile homes, and blue tarpaulins. Outside of the tiny house dimensions, romance, and optimization linked to real estate markets, the tent seeks to answer to more primary instincts towards which we should strive again. This architecture owes a lot to nomadism, which seeks simplicity through the removable and transportable shelters that are tents, with their multiple forms and functions. They are found in all parts of the world, except for the Aborigines of Australia and Southern Africa. The tent is a dwelling whose flexible walls are extended. The tension of the fabric ensures the stability of the covering and the rigidity of the frame like the Arab tent. This is an iso static system. In general, poles, often sculpted and painted with geometric figures, support a pole, and form an elementary framework on which rests a piece of fabric fixed to the ground. It is sewn and made of several woven or assembled strips, sometimes comprising up to forty sheepskins among the Tuaregs. Sometimes the tent does not fall to the ground and allows the air to circulate, sometimes it is fixed flush to the ground to protect it from the wind.

Or the opposite, the tent has a rigid frame that simply supports the skins. This is a hyper static system.

The comfortable Yurt can be erected and dismantled in half an hour. It is cylindrical in shape, covered with straw mats and topped with a cupola covered with pieces of felt. Its frame is made of a multi-piece lattice, joined by leather laces that allow the whole to be folded when the tent is dismantled. The diameter of the Yurt can be up to seven metres, and its walls are about one and a half metres high. The Tibetan tent, which is supported by a thick, onemetre-high wall of earth and grass, is rectangular in shape. It is made of extremely strong yak hair fabric. The frame is held together by several ropes decorated with small, coloured papers to ward off evil spirits. Next are the conical tents of Lapland or North America. They are built of birch or fir poles resting on hoops of naturally curved branches. This frame is covered with coarse horse, reindeer, or buffalo blankets, which are attached to it by leather straps. The round tent of the Tchoukchis is double conical, the roof of which rests on a circular wall. Three sacred poles form a tripod pole. Moreover, the placenta of each child born is topped by three sticks bound into a cone and covered with a piece of leather.35 Man is to the tent what the tent is to the world.

5. Skin

Def: The natural outer layer that covers a person, animal, fruit, etc. (Cambridge) top 0.41 mm brown tarp

The skin is made of tarpaulin, the one available. Thickness and colors are variable. It is attached and fixed to custom-made aluminum pieces that help take care of the materials.

It is put in tension from both lateral sides. The metal rods help bear the wind forces.

2 x 5 mm diam. metal rod custom c shaped steel piece

5 mm diam. metal rod

7mm hex bolt lateral 0.28 mm silver tarp top 0.41 mm brown tarp

2 x 5 mm diam. metal rod variable air «buffer zone»

30mm plywood

45/45mm aluminum C Chanel

110/200mm I aluminum beam head custom aluminum piece

30mm plywood

7mm hex bolt

45/45mm aluminum C Chanel lateral 0.28 mm brown tarp

L shaped steel welded to bracket

110/200mm I aluminum beam

“We can consider the world either as the actual space of our life or as a hilly canvas on which the images of things are painted from a distance. In this second aspect, it is only to the eye; it is made up of simultaneous parts. [...] Empiricism relies mainly on muscular sensations to show that space is not a primitive datum of experience, but that it presupposes certain temporal series whose original characteristics we must interpret to construct the representation of the simultaneous.”36

F. Transparency, Superimpositions & The Distance

Gyorgy Kepes in “The Language of Vision” defines transparency as perceiving several spatial layers simultaneously.37 It creates a rhythm that transforms our perception into discontinuity. Everything becomes a movement. This mobility that we find in the vanishing traces of travelers is there, in the folds and folds of the façades that metamorphose. There are nesting, assemblages, and diagonals which, through the combinatory play of light, extract themselves from a depth.

Nomadic architecture makes us think about the way we approach an architectural project and about the notion of space. A space in which we should constantly move.

All these superimpositions, this organization where a whole device of simultaneity plays the orchestra, lends itself to collage, an expression of a state of mind that encourages the politics of bricolage, a practice that implies the study of infinite limits. It is the heritage of human aspirations.38 Form calls for form, as it is assembled.

36. Lavelle, Louis (1921) La perception visuelle de la profondeur. Strasbourg: University of Strasbourg, pp. 29. 79 p.

37. Kepes, Gyorgy (1968). Signes, Image, Symboles. Bruges: La connaissance, les presses Saint-Augustin. 238 p.

38. Louis Lavelle (1921)

The Nomad, looking skywards:

“I take in the sky full of stars with a single glance Even with the naked eye, I roughly grasp the similarities and differences of the figures formed by the stars in the various regions of the sky. Isn’t there a geometry gathered in the moment?”39

Space is certainly defined by the elements that serve to delimit it, such as walls, doors, windows, curtains. Space is what is in between, it is also everything that isn’t owned or domesticated. It is the passages between two layers, volumes within volumes, superimpositions that create transparencies. It belongs only to the visitor, or better still, to the inhabitant who experiences it from the inside.

Architects have been looking at these small capsules, shelters to the scale of the body, even cities that can move at another scale.

The study of nomadic architecture being able to move in time participate in a conversation. The long-lasting cult of mobile tools to travel distances, instinctive but pragmatic. All within the spectrum of available materials, customs, and rhythm. We seek to find here an overview of how nomadism is reflected through its shapes, symbolism, structures, and materials, in old and recent eras. The function

1. Dugout Canoe

2. Domesticated horse

3. Details of Napoleon’s Military Carriage

4. Leon Serpollet, Peugeot

5. Almere House/ Benthem&

6. Dymaxion House, Buckminster Fuller

7. RAPIDO, Constant Rousseau

8. Walking City/ Ron Herron

9. Plug-in City/ Peter Cook

10. Gasket Homes/ Warren

11. Capsules/ Warren Chalk isn’t a matter. Between the lines of a machine, the world, the scene stays in motion. It is an orchestra, a metamorphosis in which anyone can play a part and engage with what is found. Elements of design only allow flexibility and adaptability. The one lasting function of a mobile architecture belongs in the alternative.40

12.

13.

14.

A glance is not enough, it is the repetition that makes the lines and walls dynamic. The lights move. The gaze is at the center of a new, dynamic space. A centre that moves, from one point to another, with motion, in all the design elements. These serve as secondary ergonomic tools.

Always between the terrestrial and cosmic domains, human beings inevitably travel. Either substantially or ethereally, a human’s physical impotence and the mobility of its spirit lies in duality within. The sublime tragedy of the spiritual.41

40. Mobility is nothing but the possibility and all the alternatives, available roads. It is flexible: it doesn’t have to move but it can. It is public and everywhere.

41. Paul Klee (1914)

6. Design

6.1. Suspend

Def: To stop something from being active, either temporarily or permanently. To hang something.(Cambridge)

The plywood at the top of the assemblage serves as a structure from which elements of design can be suspended. There is movement in the suspension. With distance and scalability, we find the superimpositions and rhythms in the perception of this new space.

6.2. Variable

Def: A number, amount, or situation that can change: (Cambridge)

The variability depends on what is found on the way, all of its changing elements. What is there to be found?

It is totally subjective and context-dependent. The everchanging context is also entirely dependent on if the shelter needs to move. It takes the time it needs. A subjective selection of furniture that is found in my thoughts is drawn here.

Isometric. Variable elements found along the way

G. The Digital Nomad

«Utopians hate roads because they lead somewhere else», says François-Bernard Huygues.42 The Nomad is the one who escapes from modern utopias, whether it is the intellectual city linked little by little to the augmented human, or the original garden nourished by new communities, to find nature and its benefits.

Outside of political refugees, homeless, travelers, nomad tribes, and itinerants, who are the users of such a lifestyle in our westernized world? Why, and how is there a will to escape out of the frame? An in or post-pandemic reaction or a digital, less analog experience?

The modern nomad has undergone a housing crisis, a work crisis. The increasingly fragmented family unit favors mobility. The loss of religious values resulting from rottenness is also one of the causes of modern nomadism. Distrust of educational institutions and failure at school is leading parents to turn to alternative voices, e-learning, where the screen becomes the teacher of choice. The screen is another phenomenon, but a compelling tool with overloaded digital information for the spirit. Yet, it excludes completely the art of a body in motion. Modern life, from metaverse to organics, is sending out new signals which, until a decade ago, were very weak. Humanity, since self-reflection emerged, knows how to recognize a variety of signs that he or she learns to perceive and interpret, to orient their self in a world that is itself moving and changing by nature. The Nomad is the first to reject the systems of symbols42 imposed and structured by the new authorities, for a well-defined social order, with its laws, codes, transactions, and electronic enclosures. The nomads are then looking for new codes, new signs, new symbols that connect them to a more natural rhythm, from one point to another, excluding themselves from the «outside» of the city-bubbles, and from any miniaturization.

42. PhD in political science and HDR, is president of the Strategic Information Observatory (OSI) and director of research at Iris (cyberstrategy, influence...).

72% would trade their home for van life to pay off debt.

52% are more likely to consider van life due to COVID-19.

35% would like to be outdoor more.

35% would be in their van by the beach.

24% would try it for more than two years.

7% wouldn’t consider it.

The Nomad goes towards the great, the infinite of the road, he or she becomes small as nature expands in front of the body, and suddenly all around it. This shrinking of his or her condition converges with a growing autonomy of the Nomad. They organize their journeys, within an imposed road system, but also along paths imposed by nature itself, forcing the Nomad to self-build, interfering with the builders of the cities.

The Nomad makes the road a receptacle for new symbols to be conquered43, starting with a floor that becomes the roof through which he or she certainly shelters him or herself, but also through which he or she signifies growing up outside the world.

7. Users

Def: Someone who uses a product, machine, or service.

(Cambridge) top 0.41 mm brown tarp

The mobile architecture lives through its users. They are the ones to manipulate and act the change in any context. The use and design are thus, contextdependent.

2 x 5 mm diam. metal rod variable air «buffer zone»

30mm plywood

45/45mm aluminum C Chanel

110/200mm I aluminum beam

Section. Longitudinal

Asphalt Surface

Asphalt Binder

Aggregate base course

Drainage

Separation fabric

Subgrade