Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space [Paperback]

Charlie Hailey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 3, 2009

The meaning and function of camps, from Scout Jamborees and RV Clubs to FEMA trailers and GTMO.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Drawing from an expansive range of sources, from anarchists to Boy Scouts, Katrina refugees to GTMO detainees, Hailey demonstrates his keen architect's eye in revealing camp as a pedagogic fulcrum that springs beyond traditional classroom experience. Cracking the multivalent lingo of camps, this book is more than a guide to hidden treasure or singular reading of our global territory. It is also a generative resource operating within today's interconnected terrain of identity and spatial politics, asking how we as individuals make camp."--Chris Taylor, Architect, Educator, and Director of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University

About the Author

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 imbeds 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 permanent. He looks first at camps of choice, including summer camps, protest camps, drift camps (research stations on Arctic ice floes), and LTVA (Long-Term Visitor Area) Camps, then at strategic camps regulated by power--boot camps, GTMO (the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay), immigrant camps, and others--and finally at 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. Charlie Hailey is Assistant Professor in the University of Florida's School of Architecture. He is the author of Campsite: Architectures of Duration and Place.

Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (April 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262512874
• ISBN-13: 978-0262512879
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #223,883 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars What is a camp?, September 4, 2009

By 

ROROTOKO (rorotoko dot com) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space (Paperback)

"Camps" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. Professor Hailey's book interview ran here as cover feature on September 2, 2009.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Time for Camp (and Space too), June 13, 2009

By 

Julia Lupton (Irvine, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space (Paperback)

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

This delightful book floats the simple premise that camps define the temporary landscapes of twenty-first century globalization. For Hailey, "camp" is a Big Tent Term that zones the log cabins and RVs of self-improvement and infinite mobility alongside the dark disciplinary barracks of ethnic cleansing, environmental disaster, 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. Gutheinz handles the theming with a light touch, like a Girl Scout earning her Grunge badge. So, too, Hailey writes about Agamben as if he were penning a postcard from the BN, showing us how to pack some heavy ideas into carry-on luggage.