City as Camp: Architect as Camper

Architecture promises stability and permanence through built form. But these aspirations are threatened in today’s rapidly changing and unstable world, and new relationships between urbanism, transience,and the politics of property ownership offer clues to how architecture might engage with our volatile present. To this end, what if architects operated more like campers? Campers establish communities that are both temporal and spatial; these communities are typically conceived as temporary but often become permanent through recurrence or duration. The home of campers—the camp—is a combination of generic and highly personalized spaces. Regardless of the motive behind a particular camp, they are living systems that can be rapidly deployed, altered and dismantled. This paper will explore camp— as a place and an act, and campers as the protagonists—to propose a new way of seeing, being and operating within our current cultural context. Studying material cultures, histories, and multiple subjectivities in relation to architecture’s fixity (or lack there of), will provoke new ways of engaging cities, communities and spaces.

Volume Editors
Jasmine Benyamin, Kyle Reynolds, Mo Zell, Nikole Bouchard & Whitney Moon

ISBN
978-1-944214-28-9