The New Mobility of Home:
Temporary Housing Solutions: Staying afloat requires work.
Waterpod is simultaneously an intervention and a gift, brought
to life by a collaborative group of forward-thinking artists,
designers, and activists working with numerous companies, groups,
and communities on a pro bono publico or “for the public
good” basis to create a space that is both an inclusive
public resource and an experimental private dwelling, an interior
and exterior malleable space, an aquatic and terrestrial mobile
hybrid.
This project is a work in progress that demands simultaneous
creative engagement of producers, designers, builders, visitors,
residents, and guests. The design of Waterpod is made up of
a mode of social, political, and ecological actions and engagements
that describe mobility, autonomy, and relational freedom while
respecting water, nature and natural systems. Waterpod is an
expression of collective decisions and intent, based on available
resources, trial and error, as well as an object and a space
that continues to be negotiated through democratic participation
and implementation.
How to live together. Waterpod is a composition, a transport,
an island, and a residence. Like art, architecture is largely
about stories: stories of its inhabitants, its community, its
makers and their reflections on the past or expectations of
the future. The Waterpod functions as a singular unit with the
possibility to expand into ever-evolving water communities;
an archipelagos that has the ability to migrate with the tides.
The Waterpod is an extension of body, of home, and of community,
its permanence being change. It connects river to visitor, global
to local, nature to city, and historic to futuristic ecologies.
In preparation for our coming world with an increase in population,
a decrease in usable land, and a greater flux in environmental
conditions, people will need to rely closely on immediate communities
and look for alternative living models; the Waterpod is about
cooperation, collaboration, augmentation, and metamorphosis.
With this project, we hope to encourage innovation as we visualize
the future fifty to one hundred years from now. The Waterpod
embodies self-sufficiency and resourcefulness, learning and
curiosity, human expression and creative exploration. It intends
to prepare, inform, and provide an alternative to current and
future living spaces.
First Visualization, Waterpod, 2006 -MM
Waterpod - Single Living, 2006 -MM
Waterpod Uniforms (Wearable Homes), 2007 -MM
Waterpod Beta, LMCC, 2008 -MM
Inflatable Home, 2008 -MM
Waterpod Beta in the New York Harbor, 2008
BBC
News: Waterpod to Combat Rising Seas, August 30, 2009
Karen Rosenberg, Mary
Mattingly ‘Nomadographies’, New York Times, May
21, 2009
Vince Aletti, Mary Mattingly, The New Yorker, May 4, 2009
Lauren O’neil-Butler, Mary Mattingly, Art Forum 500 Words,
April 1, 2009
Artforum
> Mary Mattingly "Second Nature" at Robert Mann
Gallery by Martha Schwendener
ArtCritical
> Mary Mattingly article by Eric Gelber
City
Magazine > Young Bloods
New
York Press > Gimme Shelter by Jackie Delematre
Le
Monde Magazine > Faut-Il Climatiser La Terre?
Ecotopia
> International Center of Photography
more
press >
>>
