THE NOMAD CARAVAN - AN ECO CLUSTER OF NOMAD CARAVANS - THE MOVING CITY - THE TRAVELLING CARAVAN COMMUNITY - THE SOLAR CARAVAN CITY - EPILOGUE : THE NOMAD COCOON CARAVAN - ECO CLUSTER OF CARAVANS - CARAVAN CITY - THE MOVING CITY In my perspective one of the main villains of the global warming saga is PLASTIC. Of the 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste created historically as of 2015, only 9% has been successfully recycled. Of what remains, 12% has been incinerated into the air, and 79% has accumulated as landfill or spread as trash across oceans and landscapes. Compounding this problem, international manufacturing and low transportation prices have grown a massive global waste trade industry. Plastic waste is dispatched from the world’s largest economies and makes its way to countries with lax regulations where it has devastating effects on public health and the environment. Despite local attempts at recycling, the problem of plastic waste is global in scale. How can we address the international state of global warming with a single design decision while also taking into account that plastic is everywhere? How can my concept solve this global problem through its tipology, materiality in a way that is understandable to both children, adults and the world at large? The caravan always took humans everywhere they needed to go and facilitated our evolution as a species. Whether in the beginning of time it was made of a wooden frame and had wooden wheels or stone wheels driven by bulls, horses or camels, or that nowadays the caravan has evolved and is part automobile with a metal structure and has an engine, its purpose has always stayed the same : to take you from one place to another. Even then, people were using caravans as living spaces, sheltering from the wind, the heat, the night, the cold and predators by always setting up camps after a day’s journey and all gathering around the campfire. They used to cover the caravan with a fabric, a piece of cloth, that would extend into a tent and provide them with safety and comfort. They used to produce food by doing agriculture, hunting and gathering, but they were always moving with caravans untill those caravans turned into settlements and then into cities. This concept is not so common nowadays since humans live mostly in cities, but what if we would bring it back and make it better? With these questions in mind, I choose to embrace plastics and not deny them. This proposal invokes an easily recognizable symbol of our global exchanges: the international plastics used everywhere around the globe. The recycled polyester fabric as an architectural object and as a literal representation of waste trade, enhances the project’s use and avoids common tendencies to aestheticize plastic waste itself. Rather than producing an amalgamated form made from waste or disregarding the use of plastic, we give it a new life by accepting that it is everywhere and that it is better if we work with recycled materials derivated from plastics, materials such as polyester fabric, denim jeans fabrics and cotton fabrics. I also embrace the ideea of using recycled car / caravan parts to build a solar powered electric vehicle, because cars are here to stay, so its better to reuse indefinetely their parts for the common good rather than to let it go to waste. Set as the underlying structural order of the building, the quotidian plastic bottle and PET yarn and polyester fiber is elevated to an architectonic level by using its recycled form. The caravan is threaded through several channels onto a repeating bay system made of recycled high strength Q 235 Steel tube frames that are interlocking each other and slide into 2 railings thus making the caravan expandable twice its length. Encased in a solar canopy / sail made from recyclable high strength polyester fabric, with holes in its for the windows and zippers to open and close them, the self-propelled building module is protected from the elements while allowing daylight to filter in. Conversely, the structure becomes a beacon for the community at night. The form seeks to promote an architecture of multiplicities: domestic, industrial, traditional, and contemporary by taking an old typology and optimizing it for the global warming that we are facing. What if the concept of the caravan responded to the bioclimatic design that is required in nowadays context of global warming and also be affordable?

THE NOMAD CARAVAN - AN ECO CLUSTER OF NOMAD CARAVANS - THE MOVING CITY - THE TRAVELLING CARAVAN COMMUNITY - THE SOLAR CARAVAN CITY -