ABSTRACT
Plug-in City (Peter Cook, 1964), Capsule Homes (Warren Chalk, 1964), Gasket Homes (Ron Herron/ Warren Chalk, 1965), Living Pod (David Greene, 1967), among other projects. Such ideas informed the work of Mike Webb, which at the time became known as ‘Bowellist’, entailing a high degree of technological fleshiness and hyper-wallism. Webb’s Suitaloon project (1967) also reduced the house to a deployable and portable suit, promoting an ultimate proximity between body and architecture. This was fitted out with high-tech equipment, which users could carry around. When needed, users could inflate the pneumatic body suit and slide into a cocoon-like space that formed when the structure popped open. The Suitaloon was thought of as a comfortable and fully-served mechanism in which the distinctions between body, clothing, media and shelter were blurred, enabling the users to satisfy their needs unimpeded by the material restrictions of traditional bourgeois architecture. Other
contemporaneous projects that dealt with a similar proximity between body and building included a whole range of inhabitable capsules. The work of Kisho Kurokawa stands out with his proposal for the Osaka Expo (1970) and his Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo (1972), while an evocative pneumatism is also noticeable in the inflatable work of HausRucker-Co and Jean-Paul Jungmann, amongst many others.
