The Sleeping Car
Since the early twentieth, people have desired to perfect the art of sleeping in one’s car. For decades, ambitious attempts to transform one’s motor vehicle into a home away from home have produced innovative, iconic, and whimsical transformations.
In first quarter of the twenty-first century, self-driving vehicles liberated the design of the car from the necessity of accommodating a human driver. The spatial conventions of the drivers seat, steering wheel, dashboard, and rear view mirrors became obsolete. This enabled the spatial vessel of the car to take on new imaginative forms and functions better suited to an increasingly mobile population.
As the infrastructural skeletons of cities had been developed to accommodate the car as a single-purpose form of transportation, the abundance of urban parking spaces, systems, and structures were repurposed as mobile hoteling stations. As the design of the car was increasingly tailored towards particular needs or desires of temporary habitation (i.e. efficiency, luxury, uniqueness), new vehicular typologies emerged. The sleeping car expunged the former social stigma attached to sleeping in one’s car, and reinvigorated waning public parking and private transportation industries.
The sleeping car accommodates the basic human desires for private space as a part of public, nomadic life.