New Habitat

I was crossing a small square wrapped inside of a cluster of weighty Victorian buildings (known collectively as the Exchange Flags), when it flashed up at me: the word “resiliency” written on the outside of one of a group of tents plopped in the middle of the square. I was visiting Liverpool to attend that city’s biennial and had followed some locals on a path that I had hoped would be a shortcut to Chapel Street, where my hotel was located. The inverted V– shape structures— not true tents, but white sheets of plywood on simple frames— blocked my path. But then that was their intent: to force pedestrians to wind their way through them, slowing down long enough so that they might become intrigued and duck their heads in to see what was inside. “Resiliency” was not the only word on the skin of these simple structures. Other tents were tagged with “micro selfsufficiency,” “cultural preservation,” “affordable technology” and “sustainability.” I could not resist. I wanted to see what I might learn inside the tent about resiliency, and so maybe, too, about these other concepts to which it was connected. The interior of each tent had a brief text and accompanying architectural images. I had accidentally bumped into a display of the work of the socially engaged Taiwanese architect Hsieh YingChun, whose aim is to build structures that embody the ethic and politics named and claimed by those stenciled catchphrases that drew my attention. Inside “Resiliency,” we are offered a brief description of a project named “New Habitat” (all errors of grammar in the original):