National parking

Abstract

The mobility afforded by the rise of the information era solicits a reexamination of possible modes of mobile living. Mobility has always been closely tied to American life. Westwaid expansion defined United States history until the frontier was declared closed in the 1880s. Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier was more than just a geopolitical factor - it made Americans fundamentally different from Europeans. "No matter how rapidly cities on the Atlantic coast expanded, he argued, Americans could find a "perennial rebirth" on the frontier, "the meeting point between savagery and civilization." However, the close of the frontier produced an epochal shift in the American psyche. The National Park System was born, "setting aside by-passed land to remain wilderness in perpetuity, simulating the Frontier and thereby allowing Americans to renew themselves as they had before." The RV, a hybrid between vehicle and architecture, has evolved as an exceedingly popular apparatus for this American pursuit of renewal. Robert Sumrell and Kazys Varnelis argue that "if the frontier was a place of production, the perpetual wilderness of the national park is a place of consumption. Nothing can be produced there except the renewal of Americans through recreation." Can we re-frame the domestic potential of the RV to engage with an architecture that redefines sections of the American landscape not as amenities for solely recreation consumption but also as amenities of production?