Cushicle/Suitaloon. Issue 2 (3rd July 2017) - Webb, Michael
Abstract : An invitation from the editors of the JAE to revisit a project executed over fifty years ago may reflect a nostalgia for an imagined golden age when architects, in truth just a handful, dedicated themselves to the wholesale rethinking of the built environment. For this happy few the prospect of servitude in an architect's office endlessly reworking the client-funded classic one-off building did not exactly inspire; so, armed with a conviction that change needed to happen on the scale of the city, they coalesced into groups like Archigram to produce the clientless Plug-in City, Walking City, Instant City, Living City, Dream City and Rok Plug/Log Plug. All of them unrealizable except perhaps for Instant City, which was a sort of modernized traveling circus. And in 1969 Instant City actually happened when a cow pasture in Bethel, NY turned into a city pop. 400, 000 for four days at the end of which the cows got their pasture back. My solo offering was the 1966 Cushicle/Suitaloon, a project whose genesis was a photograph I found of a man wearing a warm suit (manufactured, apparently, by the Frankenstein company[!]). Add an air cushion vehicle (abbreviated to Cushicle ) type hovercraft, a few inflatables and some items from NASA and you were on the way to making a living environment…….or so went the hype. The JAE -requested revisitation, as might be expected, changed the project 1 not so much in terms of its appearance but in the way it gets explained. It allowed the project to develop into a less gee whiz and more thoughtful study, I would like to believe, of the concentric skins surrounding us that help compensate for the fact that rarely is the local meteorology what you might call Garden-of-Eden quality—i.e. blue sky, temps. 80°F, humidity 52%, no bugs. 2