MECHANISM OF SUSPENSION

Infrastructure and legislation

for free camping

 

THE MACHINE_

The project consists of a machine that reconfigures a coastal landscape to function as a field for outdoor free accommodation. It attempts to curate logistically and legislatively the territory that supports this possibility, a fundamental parameter of which is the organization of its infrastructure. The precondition for its existence is the radical modification of the current legal framework that would guarantee and protect free camping and free use of the commons. The landscape that derives from this process performs as an expanded field of different zones, spatial definitions, activities and forms of living. It does not have an owner, a fence or a monitored entrance and it cannot be appropriated. It is free, reversible, and offers access to common utility networks without compensation, while any productive activity, supply or provision concerns the needs of users and inhabitants – not profit.

 

It is not a building but an exposed machine. A field that measures and produces energy, collects and provides water, organizes basic hygienic facilities, water supply and an irrigation network, manages waste, produces, stores and disposes food, while it materializes fundamental architectural arrangements defining its territory. The living units do not unfold within the infrastructure, but occupy the field. Lightweight tents, fabrics, and other temporary arrangements construct various units of accommodation.

 

The relation between infrastructure, dwelling and landscape intensifies the paradox of an otherwise free camping site designed as an open machine for living. The often hidden parts of a building – cables, pipes, tanks, boilers, storage, cranes, refrigerators, kitchens, toilets, basins and faucets – are uncovered “in the middle of nowhere”, exposing the sheer size of all things considered as the “minimum necessary”. How can we expose the limits – political and social – of the ruthless exploitation and privatization that the current economy and way of life enforce?