Static caravans, a term that already embodies a kind of self-cancelling logic. Static like the
atmosphere before a thunderstorm, where your hair stands on end as if standing within different
physics. Static as in lighter than air, the balloon clinging to the ceiling by charged electron alone.
Static like the charge built up by friction on a carpet that discharges when you touch a handrail.
Static like the interferences in a broadcast, where we find ourselves listening to the electromagnetic
spectrum itself. Static as in something not quite of our lumpen, physical world. Something lighter,
looser, and atmosphere with a sharp little kick to it.
After the second world war, there was a kind of promise that living could – should – be different. No
longer the dark city of the industrial revolution, banishing dirt, disease and crumbling history.
Instead a promise of modernity – of light, of air, of cleanliness. A promise that the logistics of the
production line that had been requisitioned to produce weapons might also be able to produce the
infrastructure of peace and opportunity. A promise of new homes to return to, of a new kind of
society rebuilt from the ruins. A promise that technology, efficiency and mass production could be
the foundation of new future.
Since Le Corbusier’s manifesto Towards a New Architecture (1923) paired images of the Parthenon
with Citroens, ocean liners with airplanes, architecture dreamt that mass production would
revolutionise how we build and what we build. And at the moment where new structure – both
metaphorical and literal – were established, this idea of factory built homes came into focus. The
same dream has, since then, returned again and again in different guises.
The lessons of factory building, of production lines, of plug and play delivery to site and swift
assembly would flow outwards into the construction industry, to our homes and our cities. Things
would be cheaper, faster, cleaner, better. Homes would be something between products and
equipment. And their manufacture would liberate us from the slowness of traditional construction,
from the heavy drag of old fashioned buildings.
Yet, outside a handful of examples, and never becoming the norm, things remained thoroughly
unrevolutionised. The construction industry remains the construction industry. It’s vested interests
(yet again) undisturbed. While the complexities of buildings, places, cities are, transpired to be more
complex than problems of assembly. Techno-utopianism can only go so far when the real issues are
political, ideological, historical, social. Despite its seductive promise, mass produced homes have
been unable to solve any of our crises of housing, of housing refugees, of tackling climate issues.
Prefab homes themselves are not a solution. Without political will it remains just another way to
build.
It was not as problem solving devices that prefabricated homes came their own. Instead they found
a different use as a kind of leisure flotsam. Lightweight holiday homes, delivered to site an propped
up on bricks. Oblong units, factory fresh, ready to be kitted out with the minutiae of domestic
personalisation: net curtains, china ornaments, watercolour views, cushions and bedspreads. A
technology that architecture expected to revolutionise the future instead became armatures for the
beautiful everyday banalities of seaside holidays. Technologies and materials that may have once
been vanguards were requisitioned within an altogether more humble forms of occupation. Injection
moulded fragments of domesticity, plastic approximations of rooftiles, extruded aluminium,
architraves, mixed with the trims and details of vehicular stylings. A hybrid object that’s half a
romantic idea of home (with all the associations of rootedness and place), part the detailing of the
highway (with associations of travel and speed).
So it is without the Buckminster Fuller radicalism that static caravans dot the fringes of the UK.
Clustered in grids laid over the undulating landscapes, revealing themselves from behind a hedge, or
as the curve of the road peaks or the costal path descends. Laid out in a pragmatic urbanism,
supported by bars and restaurants, by aging pop culture murals, by club singers, magicians, the smell
of frying food mixed with vinegar. Escapes in panelised form, deployable get-aways.
These not-quite homes objects have a special planning category all of their own. By law they will
always remain detached from real life. As fleeting moments rather than continuous living.
Hallucinations of being and dwelling that touch the ground lightly. Holidays from heavy
Heidiggerianess. Settlements that never quite settle, that could pack up and head off somewhere
else at any time.
First published in Prefab Scout