A Change of Scenery

Danish art, architecture and engineering group N55 are currently displaying their latest proposal for future living on the streets of Cambridge. Walking House, commissioned by Wysing Arts, is a living capsule that is able to move itself around, roughly at the same speed as a human might walk or, say, flood levels might rise. Indeed the group envisage a dystopic future in which nomadism is not a lifestyle preference, but a necessity brought on by unstable and treacherous environmental conditions. In a recent lecture at Frieze Art Fair, Judith Williamson suggested that one problem we have in coming to terms with climate change is that we cannot imagine the future; in the past, the future was always broadly imagined as being ‘like the present but more so’. N55 are describing a nightmarish future comparable only to the fanciful projections of science fiction, in which whole agglomerations of these cellular structures trudge grimly towards high (or dry) ground, presumably trampling whatever lies in their path. Oddly I am reminded of the rainy caravan holidays I endured as a child. I shudder.