Ambulant Architectures
Turnhout to Zutendaal (Belgium), 2012.
Commissioned by Trage Wegen vzw for Sideways Festival.
For the 100km journey between Turnhout and Zutendaal, Wrights & Sites took inspiration from ramblers, nomads, refugees and DIY enthusiasts. To recognise the walker as a maker or a transformer of the lived environment. To augment this transformational potential, by assisting the walker in framing and interacting with the landscape, as well as feeding into new ideas around planning and building. To invoke architecture in its most ad hoc, democratic and accessible forms. Wrights & Sites offered an invitation to take provisional, highly portable and flexible structures for a walk – and to experiment with architectural intervention, prompted by curiosity, playfulness, resistance or need. The collective’s Ambulant Architectures were designed with a view to critically reconfigure the various spaces along the Sideways journey, by providing the possibility of demarcating, signalling, decorating, raising, celebrating, luring, containing… Stephen chose to walk with two sets of Le Corbusier’s idealised geometric forms (one solid, one wireframe).
Images: Stephen Hodge, Trage Wegen vzw, Le Corbusier, Conan Lawrence.