[ book tip by Translated Tips ] Pablo Georgieff writes about the english edition of Move House
Move House. Sean Topham uses these two terms to open up the field of portable housing. Cloth, wood, steel, plastic and other composite materials; wheeled, sliding, floating or flying; foldable, collapsible, inflatable or transportable.
Forty works from architects, builders, designers and artists have been selected in order to explore the house of the traveller.

From nomadic people to the creators of hype whose houses bear no resemblance to each other. In fact they span the entire range of habitability, from the most rudimentary to the most luxurious. They question our relationship with the house, culturally anchored in the depths of our reptilian brain. That is why this book makes us dream so much. These houses, empty, project us into the radically different daily lives that they enclose. They are often the dwellings of pioneers who push back the boundaries of the world of man with their command of fantastic machines. Scientific, military people, ascetics or poets live on the edge of the known world, the terra cognita.

Within or outside of museums artists explore the relationship between the body and the materials that make up a house. We should distinguish between two types of mobility; nomadism on the one hand and migration on the other. The first is chosen and has become, since being recycled by contemporary thinkers, almost fashionable; the second is suffered and is not very glamorous.

Leaving for a distant place or somewhere close by, but nevertheless leaving; movement is a strategy of resistance against established societal order. Dandy travellers and wandering hippies are the real nomads of the modern world; as opposed to tourists who travel to the four corners of the planet moving from one standardised hotel room to another or in over-equipped caravans – guaranteed to always have the same television programmes, the internet, mobile phones, in other words modern comforts which do not give a damn for the spirit of place.

It is not so much the transporting of one's house that makes nomadism what it is, but the continuous act of laying it down in a different place; it is having to establish a home, recognising the power of the elements and requesting permission from the telluric forces to tolerate our presence in these lands; it is being aware of our insignificance within the cosmos and being grateful for every day that we are alive.

[ book info ] Topham, Sean: Move House. Prestel Publishing, 2004 .