Linda C. Samuels, assistant professor, project creator

You want to do what??

Driving that Ford Expedition, towing that 6,000 pound trailer, was like driving a speedboat pulling a herd of buffalo. Week one was the most difficult, as we bounced our way down 85 South, through spaghetti junction and into rural Alabama. The foliage and the landscape werent new to us yet, and the constant saltine sawdust, abandoned reading materials, and headphone isolation nearly halted this adventure before it even started. Though the satellite held the studio and the darkroom with all their accompanying supplies (and all our luggage), the Expedition was loaded with the 6 of us, 3 laptops, 8 cameras, 2 video cameras, 5 pillows, winter coats, 6 CD players (plus the 5-CD changer installed in the vehicle), nearly 600 CDs, rechargeable batteries, drinks, snacks, sketchbooks, maps, random shoes and socks, and a partially depleted first aid kit. After planning for over a year and a half, it seemed hardly believable on the morning of February 15th, 2002, that we were actually pulling out of the construction yard of the UNCC College of Architecture and onto the road that would lead us to the larger road system that would eventually lead us across this country. I had never driven an SUV or anything like it, and I certainly had never pulled even the smallest of trailers. That first day was shaky and swerving and scary for all of us, and it seems we went at least a week without attempting to go in reverse. It wasnÕt really until we crossed the Mississippi River, drove through Louisiana swamp country and toward Texas, that I felt we were truly on the road.

It is impossible to separate the Mobile Studio as an idea, as an academic and architectural agenda, from the Mobile Studio as a trip. The initial mission Ð to focus on a contemporary vision of the road, the car, and mobility as critical and often ignored pieces of the American context Ð was never distinct from its methodology Ð to be submerged, immersed, and entirely focused on one subject by being in it, on it, and looking at it at all times. This immersion technique was intended to look at the mission from a design standpoint (studio), a pop-culture/reading/writing standpoint (seminar), and a visual standpoint (photography) simultaneously, hopefully encouraging such a thorough and intense stare that we couldnÕt help but make new discoveries of this now ubiquitous and hence nearly invisible condition. We are just now, several months after the completion of the journey, beginning to scratch the surface of these discoveries.

This website and the images and student work included in it, are a presentation of the information gathering phase of the Mobile Studio. Thanks to the groupÕs continuous documentation and the ambitious Mobile Studio student who designed, re-designed, and constantly updated the information included here, we achieved our goal as UNCC Satellite Ð a technological umbilical cord, a reconnaissance team, a traveling arm of the university. Other UNCC COA students as well as friends, family members, and design colleagues around the country followed along as we traveled from place to place, collaboration to collaboration, collecting a greater circle of participants and observers as we went.

We achieved many of our goals on this trip, and developed new ones as we traveled. If you look at the album pages and study the totals, we saw numerous works of architecture, installation art, roadside monuments, public spaces and famous roadways. We early on adopted awareness as a secondary mission, attempting to broaden our own awareness through seeking a variety of cultures, landscapes, cuisines, living conditions, and pedagogical models, while encouraging a more general awareness of the built environment by operating 24 hours a day as a 14 foot long billboard and talkative ambassadors for active interaction with architecture and education. We hope many of the pointing travelers inevitably passing the Mobile Studio Satellite do take the time to let us know what it was like to see us on the road, see directly through our tank of a trailer, and wonder what it was we were up to as we followed that line that crossed those circles and landed in those dots of cross-country cities.

Flexibility was critical to our success; the facilities we found ourselves docked in temporarily as we traveled varied in access, endowment, and spaciousness. We began as pseudo-invited squatters, feeling a bit like foreign invaders, but eventually got used to our gypsy status and capitalized on our road energy and bursts of intense creativity as ways to influence our new neighbors. At the temporal halfway point, we started to recognize the difference between short-term mobility (traveling, commuting, daily living) and long-term mobility (itinerant, peripatetic, adventurous, homeless, wanderer) and settled into our roles more as nomads than tourists. Somewhere in the desert, mobility became internal to our current lives, part of our identity rather than merely part of our agenda.

This continuous shift of consciousness was evident in the modifications that occurred in our curricular agenda as well. Each student began with a sub-topic, road-related focus (like consumption, pause, or homelessness). After the projects in Houston, these individual ideas shifted from programmatic imperatives, to conceptual filters through which to study the more central, main mission of mobility. The Tempe projects were truly collaborative, with the 5 Mobilites being dispersed into groups of Arizona State University students and spreading out across the Phoenix sprawl from Apache Junction to Sun City to look at present and future issues of mobility. This experience brought a range of issues to the mission Ð cultural variations, social and economic mobility, age-related issues, status, public transportation, technological effects, new highways, and ritualistic motion. Las Vegas provided a perfect programmatic impetus and a perfect site. The barren strip of median, 2 miles south of the Welcome to Las Vegas sign was studied as the home for the new Neon Museum, bringing up classic road questions of sign/symbol/speed relationships as well as concerns so prominent in Las Vegas today of the complicated pedestrian/automobile dance.

We drove from Las Vegas to Los Angeles on a Sunday afternoon, the beginning of week 6, in bumper to bumper traffic and pouring down rain. It was the first day we waited in line to get gas, and the only day we paid over two dollars a gallon. The driving to that point had been phenomenal Ð scenery like the Saguaro forest, mountains and snow in west Texas, canyons and full ground to ground rainbows. The trip into Los Angeles was hell, so we countered it by an immediate drive into Hollywood and caught the last of the famous people leaving the brand new Kodak Theater with their tiny gold men. We used the time in LA to study not an individual site or an individual program (as there were overwhelming numbers to choose from), but to look at the trip itself, to gather, analyze, and reflect on what we had seen and done up to this first endpoint. This change relieved some of the pressure of the constant shifting from site to site and allowed introspection in an attempt to capitalize on the significance of what we were, at that very moment, in the midst of accomplishing.

Each of us came back changed in some way Ð thinner, fatter, more worldly, more socially conscious, more determined, more confident, more aware, more knowledgeable, more tolerant. In some way, the Mobile Studio Ð both the academic pursuit and the trip Ð is a ripple attempting to swell a shift in the tide. Ultimately, its purpose is to ask questions about architecture and its context and about the education and responsibilities of architects and all those who inhabit our world of design. In traditional terminology, it is an extended field study, a design/build project, a collaboration Ð but there is no traditional terminology that accurately explains what one might gain from driving 9,000 miles across America with 5 students. I am convinced - the broader the mind, the greater the design.

As many people as there were who thought I was crazy for planning and then conducting this adventure, there was more than double that amount who wanted to join us. The six of us were a group with a diverse and complementary set of strengths and weaknesses, and in answer to Ken Lamblas inquiry upon our return, not only are we still speaking to each other, I believe we still have lots to learn together about this maiden voyage of the Mobile Studio. Yeats said, ÒEducation is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.Ó I hope this trip was a shower of sparks, igniting an interest in design, exploration and, of course, adventure for each of us and for those whose roads we crossed.