Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space

by Charlie Hailey

The meaning and function of camps, from Scout Jamborees and RV Clubs to FEMA trailers and GTMO. What is a camp? In August 2005, television news showed viewers an estimated 20,000 Katrina evacuees camped out in the Superdome, Cindy Sheehan protesting the Iraq War on President Bush's doorstep in "Camp Casey," Texas, and Israeli and Palestinian young people at the Seeds of Peace Camp in Maine discussing the evacuation of settlement camps in the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, off camera, summer campers all over America packed up their gear, preparing to depart Scout camps, computer camps, and sports camps, and millions of recreational vehicles owners were on the road, permanent itinerant campers. In Camps , Charlie Hailey examines the space and idea of camp as a defining dimension of 21st-century life. The ubiquity and diversity of camps calls for a guidebook. This is what Hailey offers, but it is no ordinary one. Not only does he establish a typology of camps, but he also embeds within his narrative a key to camp ideology. Thus we see how camp spaces are informed by politics and transform the ways we think about and make built environments. Hailey describes camps of diverse regions, purposes, and forms, and navigates the inherent paradoxes of zones that are neither temporary nor camps of choice, including summer camps, protest camps, drift camps (research stations on Arctic ice floes), and LTVA (Long-Term Visitor Area) Camps; strategic camps regulated by power--boot camps, GTMO (the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay), immigrant camps, and others;--and transient spaces of relief and assistance, among them refugee camps, FEMA City, work camps, and Gypsy camps. More than 150 diagrams, sketches, building and site plans, photographs, political cartoons, video game screenshots, aerial and satellite images, and maps illustrate camp space in unprecedented complexity and variety. Today camps are at the center of emerging questions of identity, residency, safety, and mobility. Camp spaces register the struggles, emergencies, and possibilities of global existence as no other space does.

544 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2009

About the author

Charlie Hailey is an architect, writer, and professor. A Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Scholar, he is the author of six books, including The Porch: Meditations on the Edge of Nature, Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space and Slab City: Dispatches from the Last Free Place. Hailey teaches design/build, studio, and theory at the University of Florida, where he was recently named Teacher/Scholar of the Year.

Reviews

[Amy Paget · Rating 5 out of 5]

Camps: a guide to 21st Century Space by Charley Hailey is a global survey, indeed a ‘field-guide’ to all constructs that include a camping element. Hailey who is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Florida, develops a taxonomy of camping that sorts camps according to autonomy, control, or necessity. For example, a queue camp, a hacker camp or a protest camp are autonomous. Refugee, immigrant or terrorists camps are organized around ‘control’. Examples of camps of ‘necessity’ include a mass shelter camp or a work camp. Over 100 camp types are each described in sections from 1-6 pages in length, often with diagrams or photos. I learned about ‘glamps’, ‘foo camps’ and ‘no borders camps’, just 3 examples of types that were new to me. Camps is a book that launches you into 21st century social explorations and leave you wanting to visit and experience some of today’s types. The book’s design, itself, has won awards and is worth examining for its own merits. Hailey is also the author of Campsite: Architecture of Duration and Place that focuses solely on the camping experience in American culture

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

As school ends, camp approaches. Whether the kids love 'em or hate 'em, parents need the structured time. And the potholders.

Charlie Hailey, an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Florida's School of Architecture, has written a wonderful guidebook to camp architecture. Entitled "Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space," the book is premised on the simple idea that camps define the temporary landscapes of twenty-first century globalization and moblization. Meanwhile, the "camp" is a big tent term that includes both those emancipatory follies that shelter the cultures of self-improvement, activism, and the RV, and the dark disciplinary tents of internment, ethnic cleansing, and the war on terror.

This MIT production is attractively designed by Emily Gutheinz to evoke the field guides of yore. The volume bears a a Kraft paper jacket, an exposed binding, and small reference-style photos and drawings throughout. The theming is handled with a light touch, like a Girl Scout earning her Grunge badge.

[Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

i liked this more for the format, the listing of the types of camps and putting them into three categories (control, necessity, autonomy) than any of the actual written descriptions. also, the book itself is kind of beautiful, open stitching with the title printed on parts of the spines of the signatures...

[Wendy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found this beautiful, engrossing book at the High Desert Test Site, a fabulous gallery-artthinktank-gathering space in Joshua Tree, CA. This is the book I didn't know I was looking for.