In the Reading, the walking city was defined as a self-contained giant machine, it reminds me of the film Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) by Miyazaki Hayao. There was a saying by Le Corbusier, “A house is a machine for living in”. In Howl’s castle, there is a heart burning in the fireplace to provide energy for everything in the castle, including the electricity, movement of the house and the house owner’s life. Like Wang Kar Wai’s films, the castle expresses the owner Howl’s inside world through the behaviour of the house.
In the highly stressed cities, we may want to escape from the existing environment, while the only way is usually to hide at home. When the house feel it is unsafe, it would also runaway like Howl’s castle. The famous actress Luan Lingyu spent her last few years travelling far away. Not having a moving castle, she was kept changing her residential with nearly no furniture until the end of her life.
A house, as a tool to become a home that shows the inside of a person regardless of the initial design nor the furniture, but due to someone lives there.
LIN Mengfei 3035799155