Living Cubes and Resource Tower from Nomadic Furniture vol.1
It is not clear to me precisely where and when the Urban Nomad movement started. Books relating to it I have found seem to have emerged in the 1960s and then fizzled out by the late 1970s, the movement being more-or-less absorbed into the more generalized Soft-Tech movement. But it was clearly distinct, with its own version of a Post-Industrial ideology. The Urban Nomads were a scattered community of young designers who shared a common image of an emerging highly mobile and very sophisticated youth culture which sought liberty through simple technologies of self-sufficiency. It wasn't a 'back to the earth' ideology based on recreating an agrarian lifestyle. It was about living light for the sake of mobility with a reliance on self-made artifacts made from common materials and industrial cast-offs for the sake of economy and efficiency, the off-the-shelf products of the consumer culture simply being impractical -too expensive, cumbersome, inefficient in their use of materials and space- for a nomadic lifestyle. Some anticipated an imminenent break-down of the consumer and corporate cultures as a result of their inherent non-sustainability and the dominant trend of technology evolution toward systems of decreasing size and increasing capability, ultimately restoring the power of self-determination through the decentralization and eventual personalization of industrial production. Put simply, they saw a future where most everyone could maintain as high a standard of living as they could imagine through the products of their own labor and ingenuity and by virtue of increasingly capable tools and clever design.
The Urban Nomads were not designing static artifacts for their aesthetic value or novelty but rather were cultivating a new kind of vernacular technology -a system of DIY fabrication which could be freely employed by anyone with simple tools and materials. So when they shared the results of their design efforts it was in the manner of sharing DIY instructions, not objects. In essence, these people were the Open Source programmers of their day. And no system of building epitomized these ideals better than Ken Isaacs' Matrix, the veritable Linux of modular construction.
Not much documentation of the Urban Nomad movement exists. Because it was characterized as relating to the 'youth culture' with its attendant 'hippies' and the like, it did not have much respect with the mainstream publishers. But its proponents were effective self-publishers and the record of this movement exists in the interesting form of an assortment of DIY building books by grass-roots small-press publishers. The Urban Nomadics movement was not about design style or theory but rather about a culture of appropriate technology. So the books the proponents of this movement wrote were intended to share the technology they had invented, much like the handyman and hobby books from which their writing and illustration style derived. This ultimately became the standard for the many Soft-Tech books which followed in the 1970s. I was able to find a few of these Urban Nomad DIY books including Ken Isaacs own How To Build Your Own Living Structures and the Nomadic Furniture vol. 1 & 2 by Hennasy and Papanek.
cube shaped house - Germany, designer unknown
first generation Microhouses
Loft Bed and Hopkins house from High-Tech
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