Michael Rakowitz uses both
practical and metaphoric strategies to call attention to social needs. His work has had a strong (but not exclusive) emphasis on inequities within the built environment, such as the inaccessibility of affordable shelter or access to private space in most cities, or the imploded legacy of failure within America's public housing system. His hybrid art practice draws on a variety of other disciplines-design, architecture, urban planning, history, activism-and has so far included sculpture, site-specific architectural intervention, performance, and installation. In some cases his projects are designed solely for presentation within gallery spaces. Others are meant to function outside, often by offering temporary, imperfect solutions that simultaneously fill needs and bring attention to untenable situations.

In 1998 Rakowitz began collaborating with homeless men in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to design the paraSITEs. Apart from a few prototypes made of vinyl and nylon, these inflatable structures are made from cheap, easily available materials-tape and white, clear, or translucent plastic bags-and then inflated with waste heat vented from buildings. When deflated, each paraSITE folds into a small, light carrying case. When used within public spaces, they become arresting public sculptures as well as shelters from cold weather and prying eyes. Rakowitz customizes each shelter for its intended occupant, a process he relates to portraiture. He has distributed shelters in Cambridge, New York, and Baltimore. The shelter that he created for Bill Stone is presented in Beyond Green; Stone gave it back to Rakowitz once he no longer needed it, and it retains the stains of use in the streets. The paraSITE kit (2005) presents materials needed to build one's own inflatable structure.

Rakowitz is also represented through a more recent project, (P)LOT (2004). Like paraSITE, it uses temporary, portable structures to reveal the complex ways in which public and private space are distributed in contemporary cities. Rakowitz designed an ingenious collapsible framework meant to fit standard, commercially produced car covers. When set up on the street, (P)LOT becomes a tent that looks like a car, creating a new kind of urban camouflage. As with the paraSITE, the whole system collapses into a carrying case for easy portability. As the title suggests, the piece is currently a pilot project; (P)LOT could eventually usurp the usual function of parking lots and metered spaces by transforming them into ersatz camping sites: P(LOT) users-pilots-would rent plots of city land for their own temporary, private, and independent purposes.