A lively and informative history of the mobile home in the United States over six decades—extensively illustrated with period photographs and vivid portraits of the people who live in mobile homes and the industry pioneers who designed and built them. In Wheel Estate, Allan Wallis offers a lively and informative history of the mobile home in the United States over six decades. His colorful account, extensively illustrated with period photographs and vivid portraits of the people who live in mobile homes and the industry pioneers who designed and built them, will inform and amuse anyone curious about this American phenomenon. Beginning with the travel trailers of the late 1920s and 1930s—with models that were built like yachts or unfolded like Polaroid cameras—Wallis moves through the World War II era, when the industry mushroomed as trailers became homes for thousands of defense workers, to the post war era, when trailers became year-round housing. The industry responded with new models—now called mobile homes—that tried to strike a balance between house and vehicle, even as owners built their own often fanciful additions (including one mobile home complete with Egyptian pylons). Carrying the story up to the present, Wallis links the need for mobile homes to continuing housing crises. He traces regulations and reforms aimed at "linear living," arguing in the end that manufactured housing remains distinctively American and embodies fundamental national ideas of home and community.

The idea that architecture can be portable is one that grabs the imagination of both designers and the people who use it, perhaps because it so often forecasts a dynamic and creative solution to the complex problems of our contemporary mobile society, while at the same time dealing with issues of practicality, economy and sustainability. Architecture in Motion examines the development of portable, transportable, demountable and temporary architecture from prehistory to the present day. From familiar vernacular models such as the tent, mobile home and houseboat, to ambitious developments in military and construction engineering, all aspects of portable building are considered. Building on his earlier works Portable Architecture and Houses in Motion, Robert Kronenburg compares traditional forms of building, current commercial products and the work of innovative designers, and examines key contemporary portable buildings to reveal surprising, exciting and imaginative examples. He explores the philosophical and technological issues raised by these experimental and futuristic prototypes. By understanding the nature of transitory architecture, a new ecologically aware design strategy can be developed to prioritise buildings that 'tread lightly on the earth' and still convey the sense of identity and community necessary for an established responsible society. This book provides a unique insight into this pivotal field of design.

In Singlewide, Sonya Salamon and Katherine MacTavish explore the role of the trailer park as a source of affordable housing. America’s trailer parks, most in rural places, shelter an estimated 12 million people, and the authors show how these parks serve as a private solution to a pressing public need. Singlewide considers the circumstances of families with school-age children in trailer parks serving whites in Illinois, Hispanics in New Mexico, and African Americans in North Carolina. By looking carefully at the daily lives of families who live side by side in rows of manufactured homes, Salamon and MacTavish draw conclusions about the importance of housing, community, and location in the families’ dreams of opportunities and success as signified by eventually owning land and a conventional home. Working-poor rural families who engage with what Salamon and MacTavish call the "mobile home industrial complex" may become caught in an expensive trap starting with their purchase of a mobile home. A family that must site its trailer in a land-lease trailer park struggles to realize any of the anticipated benefits of homeownership. Seeking to break down stereotypes, Salamon and MacTavish reveal the important place that trailer parks hold within the United States national experience. In so doing, they attempt to integrate and normalize a way of life that many see as outside the mainstream, suggesting that families who live in trailer parks, rather than being "trailer trash," culturally resemble the parks’ neighbors who live in conventional homes.

Camping is perhaps the quintessential American activity. We camp to escape, to retreat, to "find" ourselves. The camp serves as a home-away-from-home where we might rethink a deliberate life. We also camp to find a new collective space where family and society converge. Many of us attended summer camps, and the legacies of these childhood havens form part of American culture. In Campsite, Charlie Hailey provides a highly original and artfully composed interpretation of the cultural significance and inherently paradoxical nature of camps and camping in contemporary American society. Offering a new understanding of the complex relationship between place, time, and architecture in an increasingly mobile culture, Hailey explores campsites as places that necessitate a unique combination of contrasting qualities, such as locality and foreignness, mobility and fixity, temporality and permanence, and public domesticity. Camping methods reflect the rigid flexibility of the process: leaving home, arriving at a site, clearing an area, making and then finally breaking camp. The phases of this sequence are both separate and indistinct. To understand this paradox, Hailey emphasizes the role of process. He constructs a philosophical framework to elucidate the "placefulness" -- or sense of place -- of such temporary constructions and provides alternative understandings of how we think of the home and of public versus private dwelling spaces.Historically, camps have been used as places for scouting out future towns, for clearing provisional spaces, and for making semipermanent homes-away-from-home. To understand how "cultures of camping" develop and accommodate this dynamic mix of permanence and flexibility, Hailey looks at three basic qualities of the camp: as a site for place-making, as a populist precursor for modern built environments, and as a "method." Hailey's creative and philosophical approach to camps and camping allows him to construct links between such diverse projects as the "philosophers' camps" of the mid-nineteenth century, the idiosyncratic camping clubs that arose with the automobile culture in the early 1920s, and more recent uses of campsites as temporary housing for those displaced by Hurricane Katrina.In Campsite, Hailey makes a singular and significant contribution to current studies of place and vernacular architecture while also reconfiguring methods of research in cultural studies, architectural theory, and geography.

It is Ranches, Rowhouses, and Railroad Flats is a delightfully illustrated and readable introduction to the evolution of America's housing forms and the ways that they shape - and limit - the neighborhoods around them.

Who are the real campers? Through-hiking backpackers traversing the Appalachian Trail? The family in an SUV making a tour of national parks and sleeping in tents at campgrounds? People committed to the RV lifestyle who move their homes from state to state as season and whim dictate? Terence Young would say: all of the above. Camping is one of the country's most popular pastimes—tens of millions of Americans go camping every year. Whether on foot, on horseback, or in RVs, campers have been enjoying themselves for well more than a century, during which time camping’s appeal has shifted and evolved. In Heading Out, Young takes readers into nature and explores with them the history of camping in the United States.Young shows how camping progressed from an impulse among city-dwellers to seek temporary retreat from their exhausting everyday surroundings to a form of recreation so popular that an industry grew up around it to provide an endless supply of ever-lighter and more convenient gear. Young humanizes camping’s history by spotlighting key figures in its development and a sampling of the campers and the variety of their excursions. Readers will meet William H. H. Murray, who launched a craze for camping in 1869; Mary Bedell, who car camped around America for 12,000 miles in 1922; William Trent Jr., who struggled to end racial segregation in national park campgrounds before World War II; and Carolyn Patterson, who worked with the U.S. Department of State in the 1960s and 1970s to introduce foreign service personnel to the "real" America through trailer camping. These and many additional characters give readers a reason to don a headlamp, pull up a chair beside the campfire, and discover the invigorating and refreshing history of sleeping under the stars.

"You expect the city of Al Capone and what you find are pleasant boulevards coursing up and down between the neo-classical buildings of the 1893 Universal Exhibition ... The city center unfolds before you, an architectural miracle that is to twentieth-century urban planning what Venice must have been for the fifteenth century." Like a cross between Philip Marlowe and Walter Benjamin, Marco d'Eramo stalks the streets of Chicago, leaving no myth unturned. Maintaining a European's detached gaze, he slowly comes to recognize the familiar stink of modernity that blows across the Windy City, the origins of whose greatness (the slaughterhouses, the railroads, the lumber and cereal-crop trades) are by now ancient history, and where what rears its head today is already scheduled for tomorrow's chopping block. Chicago has been the stage for some of modernity's key episodes: the birth of the skyscraper, the rise of urban sociology, the world's first atomic reactor, the hard-nosed monetarism of the Chicago School. Here in this postmodern Babel, where the contradictions of American society are writ large, d'Eramo bears witness to the revolutionary, subversive power of capitalism at its purest.

There was no saving their father, but can they save each other? On her sixteenth birthday, Layla Scott uncovered an unimaginably cruel secret, and over the years tried too many times to stop the hurt. Now her sister is in the last place Layla wants to be, remembering someone Layla wants to forget, and dangerously close to the painful truth. Loss, grief and guilt have kept Chelsea clinging to her childhood home, alienating her husband and kids. She’s now alone in the house nobody wants to live in but her, and surrounded by memories of a beloved father the sea swept away three decades earlier. Chelsea hopes to confront her past trauma by returning to Sandbar Campground, but her fears only intensify when her estranged sister shows up. Can Layla, along with local surfing fanatic, Thaddeus Poulle, help Chelsea see she’s holding too tight to all the wrong things and . . . . . . the sea always gives up its secrets.