nomads and urbmads

1. Nomurbics
HouseFandango extracts.
The whole story of interior and exterior unfolds. We note some of it.
Even domestic facility as a camp has interior. The heart of the interior is the dwellers space. The
fabric of the interior is simply domestic facility; fire, campstool, conceptual boundary, or maybe
walls and roof. The amenity of this interior may include simply warmth, or seating, or it may
include windless air and shade. The exterior is the reverse side of the fabric that creates the
interior, even the reverse side of a conceptual boundary. Surely without built interior the world
would never have been thought of as open air, nor external nor outside; except in the sense of
outside a realm or a copse of trees. A cave is in, one would go out of it, but this ‘out’ doesn’t seem
to fit the outdoors scenario. We have become pale – unless we were originally simply soft enough
for Eden.
Panels that open and close - doors and the like. If there were no houses you would never see mother
with sunny window-pane patterns warming her blouse – nor father. Captivated aside a moment from
a boxed-in workaday, as to the where’s and whys of the house, by a sensation mysterious to him, in
fact a deep engulfing nomurbic vortex in the swirl and rhythm, he snapped back to routine and
wakely places a shirt in the washing machine, framed by the doorway to the laundry. Open the door,
close it. Space, light, interest, movement. There one moment, the next changed at the motion of a
hand; a sound as the jamb is struck; the wood is in the hole. The bead curtain has flopped back to
straight. A door is a door, a window an air vent, a straight line a part of the aesthetic profile, inside
and out. The lounge lizard isn’t moved.
Not all houses have them, and some houses have only the native land, yet as part of nature’s
vegetated surrounds, the garden offers rich potential to bind house and land – earthy nurtures. And
the house offers rich potential to enhance life in the garden; as distinct from life in the land - that is,
notwithstanding the potential traps of interior.
By utilizing the land around for living we can make do with
less by way of building.
There’s some eco wisdom there; one step towards an ecopian urbanity - nomurbics. The nomadic land-living ethos
embracing settled interior-valuing ethos – at that nomurbic crossroads.
Tradition, adaptation, mediocrity, industrial limitations,
marketability, mortgage conditions, regulation, by-law.
These are all societal contribution to and societal impact upon
design.
Within permitted discretions it is mandatory in design to accept
regulation and established planning. Along with regulation and planning, it is optional to accept
economic and cultural conventions or trends. Building regulations limit what can be done in design
and sometimes enforce a house that is more than needed – if not a mere dog box relative to healthy
lifestyle. But the accurate supervision of hygienics, land-use and security by authoritative process is
invaluable. “Or should we say, would be invaluable if it set to reducing excess such as the traps of
our huger interiors!” comes a passionate nomurbic voice. “What use is stringent energy
COMMUNAL
COORDINATIONS
& MARKET
MAKING, BUILDING, DESIGNING

2. regulation, without the curbing of gargantuan playdough and landscape consumers
embodying huge energy per dweller capita in huge houselocusts.” The applause of the
stratospheric strollers rings long and loud for Low Carl’s call.
The only thing plainly tangible about regulation is printed text. The meanings have unclear roots. As
well, I have read some terrible English in formal planning documents. Are the public authorities and
their lobbyists doing it correctly? Too much. Not enough. Red tape. Bias. Yes and no and also the
megamonster kicks in and Bobby’s task in Arcosanti is clear.
Environmental regulations are becoming more stringent, with respect to energy, building materials and planning. Change
is happening too quickly. Politics is often expedient. Bureaucrats can pretend. Community opinion is usually diverse and
pointed to selfish ulteriors. Democracy can mean apparent rule by a mistaken majority. With passion, the underground
strives to save environments and species’ and people’s habitational amenity - its integrity proven by lack of pay. A large
proportion of the underground too is mistaken in essence. Whence comes the blast from the sun, to rinse clean everyone.
Or are we all bound for last earthly days looking for the one fish in simmering soupy oceans. Low Carl straightens his torn
collar and heads for the city library internet. His email is to you. "If you haven't already done so, put it down now. This is
serious. We can't leave it all to Bobby! Don't invest in a 'hot brick' dwelling. Put it down. Convert it. Change the orthodox.
One vote and you are not guilty." We are all participants in public authority and cultural development. Let us help Global
Pale to detox his bus and debox his residential property. Ingenuity may find the antigravity hover-car. The harmonious
dwelling circumstance. The pure playdough. The dream bubble is burst by some pins from both regulation and orthodoxy.
It is not easily answered. Call for the blast from the sun.
Is the architect;
ζ An EPHEMERAL NOMAD, so as to be nature’s earthy nurtures landscape-designing the
interior, and
Ω A SOCIAL BEING, so as to be tweaking the synthetic address and the regulations, and
¬ A PERENNIAL SETTLER, so as to facilitate hallowed halling and fruitful continuum?
Are civilised and social coordinations just like the winds, sands and gravities that shape, weather and shake?
DDo i n g y o u r o w n h o u s i n g . Doing another’s housing. Housefandango;
doing, using, responding to and living relative to housing. Domestic activity - creative building, making,
designing, habitation, hospitality, cleaning, renovating, resourcing, checklist ticking and enhancing. This
chapter is about the actions that have caused you to be housed as you are – choices, attitudes, attentions,
predilections and freedoms. And the actions and reactions that occur as a result of your abode - enjoyment,
hard work and chores. It touches on the doing of nomadic domestics and those doings that culminate in the
industrial frontier – your connection to nomurbics and ecopicality. It also relates strongly to those who do
housing for others - welfare programmers, architects, regulators, commercial developers and domestic item
producers. With the foregoing chapters it goes a distance to empower you with respect to your own domestic
immediacy and your political and social potency. It is more a corridor through the book than a room. Lining
the corridor you may recall :– ‘We know why’, the checklist, the dignity of dweller quicksilver abstractions and
your synthetic aesthetic, calling your own shots, simple ecopical action and use of playdough, your
accumulations, the ergonomic matrix, preening it of grid infections, a person in motion, cosmic symbol, your
place in your continuum, the sociology of the doorknocker, compromise, attitude, deboxing, the trap of

3. interior, the architects’
perspectives, the domestic-
contraption is a key.
Dreaming is doing. Using is doing.
The happening organism is doing.
We have talked a little about
original, primitive and evolutionary
doings and what Albert Gallopilong
and dolphins don’t. The
happening settled person today
generally spends

4. much of its time doing something associated with housing. Very significant quanta. You are doing some now
as you read. It’s something we do - housing. It’s the Housefandango. It is usually very big in our lives. As big
as that which it makes and hones. And that which we afford or borrow. “Jesus is preparing a place,” comes a
surprising comment from Pale. “In the heavenly city we may be nomadic in our prepared abode,” suggests
Cheekybugga.
We do other things too - recreation, investigate the world, socialise, help each other, eat, collect stamps and
create. The nomadic person
spends more time not doing housing things than does the settled person; and far more than the rat racer.
An attitude. Whatever, it is it’s in the roots of our cultural acclimatisations. It is safe to note that, within all reasonability,
there is some middle ground where people may build without disruption of another’s reasonable domestic option, be the
option extreme nomadism or ecopical settlement, or indeed, Nature’s own environment. There is some middle ground,
where the hunter-gatherer is content to accept contained horticulture by the settler and hyper-industry is hyper-
ecodisciplined. Where natural selection is supplemented by contraception. Ecopia, as yet a figment township at the
nomurbic nub, the crossroads - a modicum of building which is extremely sensitive to ecological extrapolations and
respectful and encouraging of extreme nomadism. Extremely disciplined. Spirited by the flighty nub butterfly. It is
protocoled by universal nomad-cum-settler domestics - nomurbics. A physical reality arranged about the nomurbic nub.
Its Australian symbol can be Albert Gallopilong shepherding a descendant British lamb with a handcrafted spear. Its global
symbol can be a theodolite shared in indigenous and industrial hands.
The most devoted penthouse-owner boggles at the indigenous nomadic everywhere-man and cannot
imagine exchanging his well-rooted street-alligator address for a pair of legs with muscles wiser than a
satellite navigation box. What is he doing this jetting homo superior? He is not being 'a settler' -
there is some smiling cheek from Mr Gallopilong who is fascinated by the new apparent star, a
satellite, crossing his beloved red-earthed sky.
In their foundational context; Little White Cloud found that Robert is her journey and Robert now
finds White Cloud to be all the room he needs. Together in this way their cleaving grew an ethereally
founded nature and playdough force-field, blasting with hyper nurtures. The nurtures forged the
childhood memories of home for their children in ecopical domestic nomurbic dynamics; a
masterplanned corridor blending changing landscape and diverse temporal abodes with a hallowed
supremely functional, renovated, intimately internal base-camp, which would raise Dali’s eye. The
current aspect of this domestic continuum is shrouded to the public in an ordinary largish once-pale
box, a delight for Global, on the delightful country fringe of ‘secure’ suburban mediocrity. There was
no room for an architectural award only because there was no explaining the architecture. All the
dwellers there, it is obvious, are architectonically nurtured.
Thisnub;inthefoundationofourdwellingdoings. Thetwowaysmayblend. Therearethelessonsofthetriedandthedecisionsfortoday. Dwell
uponthem;transcendentalandmatter-of-fact. Oneofthewaysthatshouldbeawinnerislosingoppressedtotheonethatiswide-opentothe
dodo-that-creeps. Thenomad,justlikethewildlife,isdozed-inandtheodolite-surveyedintoatinyremnantcorner,whilethedwellingsettler
increasesepidemicpotential. Anothermeaningof‘dwell’is‘astray’. Thebig,bigmesshasgottochange,change,change. Itisallinwhatwedo,
do,do,do. Do... .
E C O P I L I S E N O W