The Campfire

Definition

The campfire is Reyner Banham's counter-architecture: the second of the "two kinds of shelter historically created by humans" — a shelter that avoided environment in its entirety, such as "under a rock, tree, tent, or roof," or one that was "actually interfering with the local meteorology, usually by means of a campfire." Banham's case, as Gattegno and Johnson reconstruct it from "A House Is Not a Home" (Art in America, 1965): the campfire has "unique qualities which architecture cannot hope to equal, above all, its freedom and variability." The campfire does not enclose; it conditions — it warms, lights, and gathers without a membrane, producing around itself "a gradient of multiple environmental qualities with different degrees of interiority." These spatial zones "could be utilized in multiple ways, allowing for the subtle creation of multiple interiors implied by simple environmental and, by extension, experiential variation."

The concept's mechanical descendant is the Standard of Living Package — Banham's alternative bundling of mechanical and technological systems that would let the building shell grow "even thinner (almost disappear)" and the interior "larger (almost endless) and more informal," plugged into an automobile, "the quintessential enabler of the American Dream." The Package "was more than a mere set of mechanical systems. It was an atmosphere maker, 'breathing out warm air along the ground … radiating soft light and Dionne Warwick in heart-warming stereo … this could do something for a woodland glade or creek side rock that Playboy could ever do for its penthouse.'" Read through the campfire framework, it "was a sentient structure, one able to sense its surroundings and provide multiple gradients of space surrounding it" — an "energy provider" whose "energy" was expanded to include "emotive support" as "an essential part of the infrastructure of our daily lives." With it Banham realized "the dream of the un-house," stood behind what "could be read as 'anti-architectural,'" and proposed "to dissolve architecture and the typical envelope between interior and exterior entirely, allowing space to become a nomadic and transient living system."

The concept's contemporary form is the urban campfire: Gattegno and Johnson's installations (Lightswarm, Datagrove, Murmur Wall) "endeavor to create microevents and/or microenvironments around them that aspire to be 'campfires' in the urban landscape," bringing "people together in varying degrees of proximity and intimacy by creating ranges of experiences and participation." Superstudio generalized it into a world-model: their microevent landscape was "essentially the space around Banham's 'campfire.'" See automobile-vernacular (the car-plugged Package), sentient-spaces (the Package as proto-sentient structure), multiple-interiorities (the gradient's product), microevent-microenvironment (Superstudio's generalization).

Key Thinkers

• Reyner Banham — the concept's author: the two-shelter dichotomy, the campfire's "freedom and variability," the Standard of Living Package as mechanized campfire and "atmosphere maker," and "the dream of the un-house."
• Nataly Gattegno & Jason Kelly Johnson — the concept's urban programme: the campfire as the aspiration of contemporary public installations, and the gradient-of-interiority reading that makes the campfire an interior-architecture concept.
• Superstudio — the generalizer: the world as "a variable, nomadic, and ephemeral sequence of events and spaces – essentially the space around Banham's 'campfire'" (collective, not paged).

Related Concepts

• Automobile Vernacular — the Package's host technology: "Plugged into an automobile, the quintessential enabler of the American Dream" — the campfire's mechanization rides the same car-culture Banham theorized elsewhere (the drive-in lineage).
• Sentient Spaces — the Package's classification: "a sentient structure, one able to sense its surroundings and provide multiple gradients of space surrounding it" — the campfire as sentience's prototype.
• Multiple Interiorities — the campfire's spatial product: "the subtle creation of multiple interiors implied by simple environmental and, by extension, experiential variation."
• Atmosphere — the campfire's medium: it is "an atmosphere maker" — warmth, light, and music radiated as a produced envelope of effect rather than a wall.
• Microevent/Microenvironment — Superstudio's generalization: the campfire-space as the world-model of energy-and-event habitation.
• Event Space — the gathering function: the campfire as the original event space — the exceptional, gathering-making interior without a room.
• Enclosure — the concept's negative: the campfire interferes with meteorology instead of avoiding it; the rock/tree/tent/roof shelter is enclosure's archaic form the campfire concept displaces.
• Inside/Outside Dialectic — the boundary at stake: "the dream of the un-house" dissolves "the typical envelope between interior and exterior entirely" — the campfire as the dialectic's gradient form.
• Comfort — the provision delivered: warm air, soft light, stereo — the campfire as comfort's original distributed, non-architectural technology.
• Interactive Architecture — the descendant paradigm: the campfire's "freedom and variability" as the quality today's responsive installations are engineered to recover.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• From ambient environments to sentient spaces (Gattegno & Johnson 2018) — the concept's source: the two-shelter dichotomy; the campfire's "freedom and variability"; the gradient-of-interiority reading; the Standard of Living Package as atmosphere-maker, sentient structure, and un-house; the urban-campfire aspiration of Lightswarm/Datagrove/Murmur Wall.
• Inside out (Webb 2018) — the sibling 1965 lineage: Webb's Drive-in House drawn from Banham's same "Letter from America" moment — "the automobile-induced vernacular of mobile homes and drive-ins that represented a radical change in the basic programming of a building" — the campfire concept's car-culture twin (see drive-in-house, automobile-vernacular).

Open Questions

• The campfire produces interiority without enclosure — can gradient-based interiority (degrees of warmth, light, sound) do what Grosz's enframing thesis says a boundary must (demarcate an inside), or is the campfire's "interior" only ever positional and temporary?
• Banham prized the campfire's "freedom and variability" — qualities "architecture cannot hope to equal." Is the Standard of Living Package's mechanized campfire then a liberation from architecture or a transfer of architecture's powers to energy infrastructure (with today's grid politics of "ownership, privacy, access, and capitalism" as the price)?
• The Package was plugged into the automobile; the installations are plugged into the data grid. Is the campfire concept's history the history of its plug — car, socket, network — and does each new plug re-politicize the supposedly innocent fire?
• Superstudio made the whole world the campfire's space ("neither an interior nor an exterior condition"); Gattegno and Johnson scale it back to urban installations. Which is the concept's true horizon — the world-as-campfire or the campfire-as-urban-hearth — and what is lost between them?
• The Package provided "emotive support" (the Dionne Warwick stereo) — is the campfire concept's deepest claim that comfort is cultural, not thermal, and does the smart-surface descendant (the "smart" wall streaming data) still provide it?