コーウィン・ウィルソンによる「移動住宅」の提案とその思想的背景

抄録

 The topic of this paper is a proposal to build “mobile houses” put forward by American housing researcher/inventor Corwin Willson. In the 1930s, Willson proposed constructing houses on wheels to solve the housing problems of the Great Depression. His design was developed based on tourist trailers, which had grown in popularity at the time. Previous studies have evaluated his proposal for mobile houses as an innovation in the field of prefabrication of buildings. The thought or ideology behind the proposal, however, has not been elucidated in detail. To shed further light on Willson’s thinking, this paper investigates his writings from the 1930s, which are hardly examined in the existing research, with a focus on his magazine articles published in Trailer Travel Magazine, a trailer journal founded in 1936. In these articles, Willson located his proposed mobile houses in a broad historical and social context and discussed advanced issues such as communities of mobile houses, a construction system for mobile houses, and legislations against them.

 In the first two articles, Willson discussed the historical and social positioning of trailers and mobile houses. In his view, their popularity was not a passing fad but an expression of a fundamental desire of the human race: movement. According to him, in the prehistoric age, most human shelters had been mobile. However, they had been superseded by fixed shelters since the beginning of recorded history. Willson also claimed that, in addition to a prehistorical and fundamental character, trailers and mobile houses bore a truly democratic and American character, in contrast to the aristocratic and European one.

 In other articles, Willson discussed advanced issues according to the aforementioned claims. For instance, he suggested the possibility of communities that totally consisted of buildings on wheels: the “Mobiletown.” In his view, this type of community resembled small and productive ancient communities based on hunting and gathering, which were replaced by fixed big cities in later years. His “Mobiletown” would be a renewed version of this type of community assisted by new technologies such as automobiles. Correspondingly, concerning the construction system for mobile houses, he pointed out its similarity to “the ancient democratic engineering techniques.” The construction system was also characterized by the tension principle of tent structure and opposed to the compression principle of monumental buildings.

 In conclusion, Willson’s proposal to build mobile houses was not only the development of prefabrication of buildings, but also a means of social reformation based on the ideological background described above. In this regard, it is possible to consider his proposal as one of the utopian projects under the Great Depression, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City. However, in contrast to Wright’s proposal, which was based on agrarian ideals, Willson’s proposal derived its uniqueness from the ideal of mobility freed from the land.