In memory of SPAZ, (Semi-Permanent Autonomous Zone), the Berkeley, California warehouse collective that was just evicted after five glorious years of hardcore concerts, trapeze artistry, and other general mayhem. Dedicated to superwoman Jenny Yang, trying harder than anybody I know to make the revolutionary warehouse collective happen! The Revoltron Revolution continues! This time, the question is, how can people live lightly in the city, in a converted factory warehouse? Instead of parcelling the massive space -- essentially one big-ass room -- into single-family lofts, a huge waste, how can we conserve resources by living collectively? How do we allow for both privacy, publicity, and everything in between? When living with a dozen or so people, you're looking at thousands of relationships in various combinations, and all of them are always in flux. One month you may be sleeping with a certain someone, the next with someone else. Yesterday you wanted company, today you want to be left alone; we all get like that sometimes. How do we create a modular plan that wont leave us feeling frustrated? The solution I'm proposing is a series of papercrete pods on wheels -- small rooms that you can move about the big room. Since the warehouse walls are already supporting the ceiling, the walls of the individual rooms don't have to bear the load of the roof, so they can be independent of the original structure. Papercrete is the perfect material to use for the walls of the pods. It provides a high level of soundproofing to drown out raucous collective activity. It's exceptionally light, so it won't weigh down the modular pod's movements. And although papercrete soaks up liquids easily, there won't be any rainwater to worry about indoors. In the diagram of the single Spadepod below, the colour purple represents the futon for sitting and sleeping; the colour red represents the walls, and the colour brown represents the doors. The red boxes are milkcrete (milk crates filled with papercrete) bricks that can be easily assembled and disassembled by one person, like Mega Lego, making a selectively semi-permeable cell membrane. The following two diagrams demonstrate how two, three, or even four Spadepods can be combined to create ever larger social spaces. The colour grey here represents the visual range from the perspective of someone sitting on a futon. The layout of the pods still allows for private corner closets, and for individual entry and exit access, even when the pods are all joined together.

The following two diagrams demonstrate how two Spadepods can be joined at the genitals, literally and figuratively. By removing the milkcrete bricks behind the futon, two Revoltronaries can combine their living quarters and create a queen size bed for two. And by each opening up one of their respective closets, they can make more space at the foot of the bed, retaining the other closets out of view.

The kitchen and bathroom would probably both need to be securely fixed, in order to ensure white water, grey water, and black water service. But there's no reason why people's bedrooms couldn't be island in the stream, floating about on a sea of ballbearings. When beautiful circus freaklings like us live all together, the possibilities are limitless... and the anarchist architecture should reflect that!