FROM PITCHING TO LODGING

Collaboration with The Kuwait Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia

May 22 - Nov 21, 2021
Artiglierie Arsenale, Venezia

Camping is a quintessential regional activity derived from a history of nomadic and tribal traditions, retained as cultural practice in tandem with a modern urban lifestyle. Its methods reflect a site’s flexibility for place-making and as a populist precursor for modern built environments. Camping was once a cyclical process of siting, clearing, and departing. Its conditions carried an aesthetic of disappearance, from campsite to campsite, in an unmappable landscape of subtle flows and movements. Today, camping involves inventing and constructing spaces as temporary homes at a particular site, adapted to replicate modern-day urban living in isolation. There is a complicated relationship between place, time, and architecture, as these sites necessitate a unique combination of contradicting qualities. Campsites have become local and foreign, mobile and fixed, temporary and permanent, public and domestic.

The romanticized notion of camping—when to leave was to sever all bonds—has been replaced by processes of permanency. The activities involved in contemporary camping methods have negatively impacted the landscape and its soil due to off-road transport by cars, camping facilities such as bathrooms with cement floors, and heavy equipment such as electrical generators and gas stoves. As a result, soil erosion, soil compaction, and the decline of vegetation drive land degradation. Already impacted by the lack of rain, Kuwait’s desert plants deteriorate from the misuse of desert areas by seasonal campers. Further complicating the situation are the demarcations of territories where campers carve out their own spaces, defining and positioning themselves and their surroundings. The boundaries separate the public spaces from the private in the form of constructed pavilions. Simulating the protective walls of a fort, wooden poles with lights attached, and dug-up sand piles and tyres surround campsites to define territorial boundaries. The camping scenes dotting the landscape become places that nostalgically recreate neighbourhood life while forming ephemeral housing pads.

The thresholds or boundaries within these temporary urban situations operate in several ways. They are aligned in multiple directions while simultaneously mirroring the urban spaces that the campers seek to escape. Trucks converted into little stores become semi-permanent fixtures, make-shift service stations, food trucks, and farm stalls. They emulate the urban networks of consumption across the fabric of campsites. The simulation of mini centres further facilitates the camping experience, expanding the use of land while multiplying the remnants left behind. Pieces of furniture such as beds, cabinets, carpets, kitchens, and toilets physically echo the spatial conditions of abandoned campsites, continuously claiming notions of territorialization that prevent subsequent use. They remain buried in the landscape, rejected by their users as gifts for future archaeologists. Thus, a paradoxical physical manifestation occurs driven by the essential human need to connect and separate; bring together and divide; claim and abandon.

Space Wars Editors