Camp(site): Architecture(s) of duration and place (Florida, Mississippi, California)

This research seeks to understand how camps and campsites are made within contemporary culture. At one level, the study of camps provides a rereading of the conception of place in cultures of itinerancy. Such an interpretation of place requires a concomitant review of time. At a more detailed level as vernacular constructions, camps negotiate qualities of mobility and fixity, temporality and permanence, and publicity and domesticity. Premises for this research include the idea that camps are paradoxical constructions of place and duration and that the vernacular is a dynamic situation best understood as a process. An overriding concern of this work is the problem of privileging conceptions and conditions of space over the situations of place in the practice and research of architecture. In addition, questions of how the vernacular built environment might inform the theory and practice of architecture make this study an exploration of possibilities for contemporary architectural method influenced by complexities of place. The work thus seeks to propose methods apposite to the study of paradoxical situations such as camps. As relatively unexplored examples of the vernacular, camps suggest how place and time influence architectural constructions.; A series of case studies provides a critical review of selected camps and campsites. The study focuses on the following places: in Florida, camps near Tampa Bay and Sarasota, Gibsonton, and Braden Castle Park; Manila Village in the Mississippi Delta; and Slab City in southern California. Utilizing both explanatory and exploratory study types, this multiple-case format adapts a hermeneutic research method to understand the particular campsites and to inform the invention of suitable methods to map these constructions of place. From the interpretation and mapping of these camps, it is generally concluded that camp constructions require a revised understanding of place as a multivalent grounding that works between detail and territory and necessitate a reconsideration of time as duration. Such constructions of place and duration also call for a recalibration of the notion of home in a modern culture of itinerancy.; Drawing from these case studies, this project's critical objective is to understand how camps address paradoxes of place and the paradoxical occupation of these places through time, because it is in the architectural response to these conditions that lie methods for design practice within contemporary conditions of itinerancy.