Research developed from an invitation by Bamboo magazine, published in November 2015.
The nomadic house needs, above all, an address in the metropolis.
This is the starting point of this proposal, which inverts the object of investigation: instead of designing the nomadic device, we dedicate ourselves to imagining how each of the most varied types of nomadic houses could be temporarily inserted into cities, in different urban situations.
Thinking about sustainability in contemporary metropolises presupposes considering high density, free accessibility, and the provision of infrastructures as a platform that enables the freedom of those who choose to be nomadic. The nomadic house can only exist from an ecology of the urban, radically connected to the city and fully benefiting from it.
What is proposed, therefore, is the creation of this address, introducing into the city a new typology — the infrastructural support — which fills voids, receives the most varied nomadic houses, and thus defines a type of building whose image is permanently under construction, conceived as a permanent platform that accommodates mutability and can receive any house, easily lifted to an elevated level, supported by a light metal structural system and connected to infrastructure systems. These, in turn, optimize resources and scale by being collectively conceived, previously planned, and integrated into all energy production systems, water reuse, and waste treatment and recycling systems.
These infrastructures could also be directly connected to the cities’ public transport systems — subways, trams, buses, bike lanes, sidewalks, and pocket parks on their ground floors — always treated as extensions of the city, with high capacity to stimulate public use as open areas with temporary occupations, which may also connect to building infrastructure networks, such as contemporary nomadic restaurants and bars — the now popular food trucks.
Conceived as a system that would consider the implementation of several such supports along the densest areas of cities, the infrastructure for the Brazilian nomadic house would allow the expansion of the freedom of its residents, who could change addresses according to their convenience, living closer to work or school and, consequently, reducing daily commutes in the city and avoiding demand on public transportation.
The investigation into the possibilities of appropriation, on the one hand, of airspace or residual voids and areas in cities — such as the blind façades of large buildings in central areas — or, on the other hand, the reinterpretation of notable urban models, originally conceived from complete and stable architectural systems, such as the Superquadras of Brasília, introducing indeterminacy and mutability into them, are only two among many possibilities for creating addresses for nomadic houses.
