But among the colossal temples and megalomaniac monuments, this spy-poor cousin has been making steps toward recognition. It need not mean that a building is transportable, only that it can be moved in meaningful, and preferably reversible, ways. An otherwise static building can achieve a state of perpetual motion by having its informational content constantly updated and reprogrammed. There's also a kind of symbolic or suggested mobility in some architecture, such as the fantastic curves of Frank Gehry, or vast projections onto static surfaces that bring movement to the beholder. Mobile architecture, then, can be defined not merely in terms of movable structures, but rather as a way of intelligently inhabiting a specific environment at a specific time and place in a way that better reacts to increasingly frequent social shifts.
Architectural mobility provides a certain safety.
Still, academic respect for the earliest mobile structures has remained elusive. Studies of such have widely been considered the province of anthropology, or even archaeology. The history of architecture has largely been written by sedentary sorts firmly embedded in Western traditions, who have traditionally downgraded mobile structures as too primitive or otherly to be architecture. The degree to which a culture has settled down is often unfairly equated with its degree of civilization or progress, a view that privileges grand public structures like churches and congress halls over more modest domestic ones like huts and tents, as rootedness has reflexively been considered quite a positive thing. With some exceptions, of course.