Portable architecture

What is the architecture of transience? What role does architecture play in the impermanent context of the nomad? What form does architecture take when our perception of shelter transforms from fixed and static to flexible and transportable? How does architecture react to the challenges of mobility and change? Traditional building forms speak of stability as an important aspect of architecture. Does portability imply a different building form? During the1950s Buckminister Fuller introduced the idea of mobile, portable structures. In the 1960s Archigrams' examples of architectural nomadism made the mobile home an accepted feature of our contemporary landscape. Currently, new materials and new methods of assembly and transportation open opportunities for rethinking portable architecture. For this thesis, a shelter was developed which provides inhabitable space and portability. The shelter was designed to be easily carried as a backpack. With minimum human effort, the structure is assembled and erected in a few minutes. Although this portable shelter needs to be maneuvered, folded and tucked away for transportation, it does meet the demands of nomadic behavior which emphasizes comfort and portability.

Hallelujah Shoes

HALLELUJAH SHOES is a collection of poems, many grounded in the landscape and vernacular of rural and coastal North Florida, and steeped in a sense of place, loss, and the difficulties and mysteries of the human condition. Written mainly in free verse, the collection also contains poems written in traditional and nontraditional forms: abecedarian, haiku, sonnet, noun, and theatrical play. Section one is dominated by the narrator’s relationships with family and culture—their demands, dramas, and allures—and the conflict they create with the narrator’s desire for autonomy. Section two focuses on the narrator as she makes her own way in the world, exercising independence yet still subject to the emotional undertow of childhood experiences. Section three locates the narrator in the present, back in Florida after many years away, with knowledge of the transience of life, but taking joy where she can find it.