Technology has for a long time been shaping how we live but what about where we live? Our devices are allowing us to become increasingly mobile but that we still roam from fixed place to fixed place. What if our buildings were as mobile as us?

Bruce Sterling writes about an architect working on the idea of adaptive buildings:

And yet Roche’s scheme is not just fun to think about, but eerily plausible. He’s exploiting ideas that make perfect sense in computer-driven fabrication but have never been applied to architecture. Imagine a building where the needs and desires of its inhabitants are hot-wired to the shapes of walls and floors, which can be extended and updated ad hoc, ad infinitum.

That’s Node 1. It’s an idea for a building, yes, but it lacks most of the usual architectural accoutrements: blueprints, material suppliers, subcontractors. Instead, Roche imagines a programmable assembly device dubbed the “viab,” a construction robot capable of improvising as it assembles walls, ducts, cables, and pipes.

Although the kind of structure Roche is proposing is not a moble structure it however could be a home for mobile communities, constantly adapting to the coming and going of it’s residents.

The concept isn’t as alien as it may seem; nature has been doing something similar for eons. Termites build skyscrapers by spitting and smoothing mud, then removing the structure if it gets in the way. A mound is shaped by the activity of the society within it.

Parasitic architecture, on the other hand, is a home for the mobile individual:

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Parasites have not only become a fashion phenomenon, the term is increasingly being used for small mobile structures of all kinds. Usually, the comparison breaks down because architectural parasites are not pests: they do not draw off energy from their hosts. Among the few exceptions are the paraSITES of the American artists Michael Rakowitz. These tent-like dwellings for the homeless - mobile architecture for people who have no other choice than mobility and are often cursed as “social parasites” - can be connected to the waste-air pipes of buildings to inflate the dwellings and keep them warm. The existing architecture is seen as a body whose lungs and organs of digestion produce enough surplus energy for weaker, dependent organisms.

There’s this Cannibal Ox lyric that goes, ‘I’m not a bum I’m a nomad / Off dome, thoughts have no home / The page is ours to roam’.
This could be home to digital nomad’s of the future. In fact, some of it sounds like the Cheap Motel Case stays in in Neuromancer…