district today uses some temporary classrooms. More are on the way. Indeed, temporary classrooms are to the school construction industry what paper dresses are to the clothing industry – a foretaste of the future.
The purpose of temporary classrooms is to help school systems cope with rapidly shifting population densities. But temporary classrooms, like disposable clothes, imply manthing relationships of shorter duration than in the past. Thus the temporary classroom teaches something even in the absence of a teacher. Like the Barbie doll, it provides the child with a vivid lesson in the impermanence of her surroundings. No sooner does the child internalize a thorough knowledge of the classroom – the way it fits into the surrounding architecture, the way the desks feel on a hot day, the way sound reverberates in it, all the subtle smells and textures that individualize any structure and lend it reality – than the structure itself may be physically removed from her environment to serve other children in another place.
Nor are mobile classrooms a purely American phenomenon. In England, architect Cedric Price has designed what he calls a 'thinkbelt' – an entirely mobile university intended to serve 20,000 students in North Staffordshire. 'It will,' he says, 'rely on temporary buildings rather than permanent ones.' It will make 'great use of mobile and variable physical enclosures' – classrooms, for example, built inside railroad cars so that they may be shunted anywhere along the four-mile campus.
Geodesic domes to house expositions, air-inflated plastic bubbles for use as command posts or construction headquarters, a whole array of pick-up-and-move temporary structures are flowing from the drawing boards of engineers and architects. In New York City, the Department of Parks has decided to build twelve 'portable playgrounds' – small, temporary playgrounds to be installed on vacant city lots until other uses are found for the land, at which time the playgrounds can be dismounted and moved elsewhere. There was a time when a playground was a reasonably permanent fixture in a neighborhood, when one's children and even, perhaps, one's children's children might, each in their turn, experience it in roughly the same way. Super-industrial playgrounds, however, refuse to stay put. They are temporary by design.
The reduction in the duration of man-thing relationships brought about by the proliferation of throw-away items and temporary structures is further intensified by the rapid spread of 'modularism.' Modularism may be defined as the attempt to lend whole structures greater permanence at the cost of making their sub-structures less permanent. Thus Cedric Price's 'thinkbelt' plan proposes that faculty and student apartments consist of pressed- steel modules that can be hoisted by crane and plugged into building frames. The frames become the only relatively permanent parts of the structure. The apartment modules can be shifted around as needed, or even, in theory, completely discarded and replaced.
It needs to be emphasized here that the distinction between disposability and mobility is, from the point of view of the duration of relationships, a thin one. Even when modules are not discarded, but merely rearranged, the result is a new configuration, a new entity. It is as if one physical structure had, in reality, been discarded and a new one created, even though some or all of the components remain the same.
Even many supposedly 'permanent' buildings today are constructed on a modular plan so that interior walls and partitions may be shifted at will to form new enclosure patterns inside. The mobile partition, indeed, might well serve as a symbol of the transient society. One scarcely ever enters a large office today without tripping over a crew of workers busily moving desks and rearranging interior space by reorganizing the partitions. In Sweden a new triumph of modularism has recently been achieved: in a model apartment house in Uppsala
Sometimes, however, modularity is directly combined with disposability. The simple, ubiquitous ballpoint pen provides an example. The original goose-quill pen had a long life expectancy. Barring accident, it lasted a long time and could be resharpened (i.e., repaired) from time to time to extend its life. The fountain pen, however, was a great technological advance because it gave the user mobility. It provided a writing tool that carried its own inkwell, thus vastly increasing its range of usefulness. The invention of the ball point consolidated and extended this advance. It provided a pen that carried its own ink supply, but that, in addition, was so cheap it could be thrown away when empty. The first truly disposable pen-and-ink combination had been created.
We have, however, not yet outgrown the psychological attitudes that accompany scarcity. Thus there are still many people today who feel a twinge of guilt at discarding even a spent ball-point pen. The response of the pen industry to this psychological reality was the creation of a ball-point pen built on the modular principle – an outer frame that the user could keep, and an inner ink module or cartridge that he could throw away and replace. By making the ink cartridge expendable, the whole structure is given extended life at the expense of the sub- structure.
There are, however, more parts than wholes. And whether he is shifting them around to create new wholes or discarding and replacing them, the user experiences a more rapid through-put of things through his life, a generalized decline in the average duration of his relationship with things. The result is a new fluidity, mobility and transience.
One of the most extreme examples of architecture designed to embody these principles was the plan put forward by the English theatrical producer Joan Littlewood with the help of Frank Newby, a structural engineer, Gordon Pask, a systems consultant, and Cedric Price, the 'thinkbelt' architect.
Miss Littlewood wanted a theater in which versatility might be maximized, in which she might present anything from an ordinary play to a political rally, from a performance of dance to a wrestling match – preferably all at the same time. She wanted, as the critic Reyner Banham has put it, a 'zone of total probability.' The result was a fantastic plan for 'The Fun Palace,' otherwise known as the 'First Giant Space Mobile in the World.' The plan calls not for a multi-purpose building, but for what is, in effect, a larger than life-sized Erector Set, a collection of modular parts that can be hung together in an almost infinite variety of ways. More or less 'permanent' vertical towers house various services – such as toilets and electronic control units – and are topped by gantry cranes that lift the modules into position and assemble them to form any temporary configuration desired. After an evening's entertainment, the cranes come out, disassemble the auditoria, exhibition halls and restaurants, and store them away.
Here is the way Reyner Banham describes it: '... the Fun Palace is a piece of ten-yearexpendable urban equipment ... Day by day this giant neo-Futurist machine will stir and reshuffle its movable parts – walls and floors, ramps and walks, steerable escalators, seating and roofing, stages and movie screens, lighting and sound systems – sometimes with only a small part walled in, but with the public poking about the exposed walks and stairs, pressing buttons to make things happen themselves.
'This, when it happens (and it is on the cards that it will, somewhere, soon) will be indeterminacy raised to a new power: no permanent monumental interior space or heroic silhouette against the sky will survive for posterity ... For the only permanently visible elements of the Fun Palace will be the 'life-support' structure on which the transient architecture will be parasitic.'
Proponents of what has become known as 'plug-in' or 'clip-on' architecture have designed whole cities based on the idea of 'transient architecture.' Extending the concepts on which the Fun Palace plan is based, they propose the construction of different types of modules which would be assigned different life expectancies. Thus the core of a 'building' might be engineered to last twenty-five years, while the plug-in room modules are built to last only three years. Letting their imaginations roam still further, they have conjured up mobile skyscrapers that rest not on fixed foundations but on gigantic 'ground effect' machines or hovercraft. The ultimate is an entire urban agglomeration freed of fixed position, floating on a cushion of air, powered by nuclear energy, and changing its inner shape even more rapidly than New York does today.
Whether or not precisely these visions become reality, the fact is that society is moving in this direction. The extension of the throw-away culture, the creation of more and more temporary structures, the spread of modularism are proceeding apace, and they all conspire toward the same psychological end: the ephemeralization of man's links with the things that surround him.
Still another development is drastically altering the man-thing nexus: the rental revolution. The spread of rentalism, a characteristic of societies rocketing toward super-industrialism, is intimately connected with all the tendencies described above. The link between Hertz cars, disposable diapers, and Joan Littlewood's 'Fun Palace,' may seem obscure at first glance, but closer inspection reveals strong inner similarities. For rentalism, too, intensifies transience.
