1973-2000
Client: Museum of Contemporary Craft, Architecture
Magazine, MOMA Workspheres Exhibit
Lead Designers: Robert Mangurian, Jeffrey Hanrahan, Mary-Ann Ray

The Portable Person is a vision of a future mobile, life-supported earth inhabitant outfitted with a technologically inspired extension of the body. These extensions responded to common human needs, the environment of the city, and emerging technologies. Conceived of in 1973, Portable Person has proved prophetic in many of the devices and inventions that formed the new 'clothing' for the human body. Some devices, such as the digital readout contained in 'ordinary eyeglasses', are still underdevelopment. Portable Person is performance based. All system elements are integrated into a whole performing technoself. Individual performance needs result in a personal ectoskeleton which appears as personal style. A 2000 revision for the Workspheres MOMA exhibit and Architecture Magazine yielded additions such as a cloak of ‘smart dust’ an array of airborne nano computers- a kind of transparent smart skin, and an illustrated revisit to the history of architecture as seen through the eyes of a version of the primitive hut which sees (as Loos and Semper have) the origins of architecture residing in the clothing of the body.