Interior / Exterior.
The caravan is the quintessential kiwi motor home that showed you all those good times over summer. A road trip round the Coromandle peninsula is never complete without your portable indoor-outdoor cruising companion. No need to rough it when you can travel in style with all your home comforts.It symbolised freedom in the outdoors with a modern advantage. The ability to explore the country with the security of a comfortable camp out.
What I love most about the caravan is its interior, which is usually coloured co-ordinated with the exterior. The 60's-70's retro printed upholstery that matched the Maltica/Formica table tops. With clashing paisley printed curtains to set it all off. With the uniquely designed storage units to fit in all manner of house hold appliances. Wherever you could squeeze in a cupboard or fold out table, your bound to find one. Sadly these iconic travelling homes have become unpopular and are the bane of motorists in a hurry to get places.
I would personally kill to do a doco on the design features of these beauties.
But I have discovered the next generation of indoor/outdoor-personalised living. Behold the ‘Wagon Station’.
When I was in NY I went to the Whitney Museum and saw this fantastic exhibition by Andrea Zittel. She organised a collective of artists to each customise a wagon station (which is usually a small, portable right angled structure), to suit the needs of their desired lifestyle. Each represented an expression of personal freedom. Some wagons had multiple levels or mezzanines with skylights and solar panels. One had cooker stored beneath the floorboards. Zittel joined two separate wagons back-to-back forming a semicircle formation with two separate living spaces resulting in a deluxe, spacious styled wagon.
The wagons were placed in the Joshua tree desert and lived in by the artists or volunteers. Rock climbers climbing in the area or for people wanting a retreat or an alternative work/recreation space.
Zittel’s sculptural works are about transforming everything necessary for life such as eating, sleeping, bathing, and socializing into artful experiments in living. These wagons encompass all those factors expressing a new way of living in a personalised lifestyle. Much the same as what the caravan represented in its glory days.
posted by afirmatron at 7:46 PM
6 Comments:
It's all about art in small spaces and living with your collections.
I'd love a classic air stream motor home. Do you know what they look like? Here are some images:
http://popular.ebay.com/ns/Other_Vehicles/Airstream.html
The Wagon Stations look awesome. I love Joshua Tree national park, but I didn't see any when I was there.
I too am a fan of the classic airstream trailor.
Wow, those wagon stations are cool. I find caravan culture quite amusing and very humouress when they find ingenious ways to destroy them on Top Gear. They are arse menace on the road and should be banned alongwith motorhomes, 4WDs and people movers. A classic 50s bubble caravan parked up at a beachside resort is a bit of me though.
Love the caravan idea Pip, and am sure it would come with an ample entourage of suitably engaging 'characters.' Cheap accomodation on the shoot too...
My Joshua Tree story - finally falling asleep on the dust dry ground under an enormous vault of stars at 2am, after flying into LAX and getting lost and found in LA rush-hour traffic. Knew I'd arrived in America when I awoke to a roadrunner pecking around our 'camp' at sunrise.
We all essentially derive from nomads, and it's probably still somewhere in us. The human fascination with homes you can take with you will never stop, and people are dealing with these topics even through art. I've never seen something like the Wagon Stations before and do think they look fantastic. For a story idea, I agree with Alastair - the true lovers of "caravaning" are often quite quirky characters who could make for a good documentary. My own grandparents, certainly somewhat strange people (but immensely practical)actually sold their nice big house in Palo Alto, California, when they both retired. For the money they bought themselves a fat motorhome. For the next seven years they travelled through the US, visited every state, stayed for a few weeks where they liked it and moved on where it was boring. When they had almost no money left, they sold their motorhome and bought a tiny mobile house in a small community in the Santa Cruz area where they lived out the rest of their lives. The whole caravan culture has something explorative about it, and that is always a good thing!
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