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Cabins
An escape to nature.
Studio North was invited by Images Publishing to write the introduction to a survey of contemporary cabins. Studio North Creative Director, Damon Hayes Couture, took the opportunity to reflect on the cabin as both a building and an idea. The essay explores its evolution from frontier shelter to architectural experiment and considers what this enduring form reveals about how we dream, design, build, and dwell today.
With thanks to Jeanette Wall and Joe Boschetti of Images Publishing for the opportunity.
Read more about the book and purchase a copy here.
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A Daydream of Departure
Looking through the glass facade of a downtown highrise, the windows of a commuter train, or the scrolling screen of a computer, our thoughts sometimes turn to a life lived differently and we dream of a cabin in nature. The cabin has a captivating presence in the landscapes of our daydreams. We might imagine reaching an alpine hut after a steep ascent up a mountainside (fig 1) or happening upon a secluded shelter on the trail through a quiet forest (fig 2). Seeking out both adventure and tranquility, our collective wanderlust has led to a recent resurgence in interest about cabins. While the cabin’s coordinates on each of our mental maps may vary, the feeling remains the same – an island of comfort and calm isolated in an inspiring landscape. It might be a familiar place that we return to with our family and friends, a foreign place we dream of someday traveling to, or a fictional place we visit only in our thoughts. Whether real or imagined, the cabin appeals to our desire to escape from our urban surroundings and retreat into nature. In a lucid daydream, the cabin stands as a distant landmark in our imaginations, just beyond the horizon, inviting us to go and explore.
fig. 2 Discovering a dilapidated cabin in the Rocky Mountains of British Colombia, Canada
fig. 1 An alpine hut in the Pamir mountains of Kyrgystan
More than just a shelter to retreat to, the cabin offers the prospect of living differently, whether by living with less or living closer to nature. In preparing for a trip to the cabin, we take only what is necessary. Accompanying the rush to pack the provisions – the sleeping bags and wool socks, the trail mix and water, the playing cards and matches – is a sense of restless anticipation. Of course, there’s always something that gets left behind, but part of the adventure inherent in the cabin is the chance to survive without all the conveniences of modern life. Finally, with everything strategically sorted and stacked, we set off towards the cabin.
The journey to the cabin is a transformative experience that offers us a different perspective on the landscape and our lives within it. On the main road out of the city, the highrises of downtown are seen from a new vantage point. No longer imposing towers, they diminish into the horizon until they disappear from view. Billboards give way to trees, concrete buildings to rock formations, and highway traffic to wildlife. From the linear trajectory of the highway, the route to the cabin evolves into a zig zagging path down gravel backroads. Whether travelling through a field, in a forest, up a mountain, or along the ocean, the landscape takes hold and directs us. The journey to the cabin traces the trail to the frontier.
“The cabin stands as a distant landmark in our imaginations, just beyond the horizon, inviting us to go and explore.”
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On the Frontier
The cabins found within this book give new form to an old idea. While they may not look like the rustic log cabins of the past, they share a similar essence: they exist on the frontier. What was once a pragmatic solution to the need for shelter on the frontier of settlement has since become an architectural exploration of the frontier of what it means to design, build, and live in the 21st century. The idea of the cabin exists between these two definitions – the limit of settled land, beyond which lies wilderness, and the limit of understanding, beyond which lies another kind of wilderness.
The frontier conjures fraught historical moments of struggle and resistance. It is also a liminal space latent with possibilities. In exploring the boundaries of the typology, designers are able to incorporate and interpret new ideas for siting, form, program, and materials. Unlike many architectural typologies, the cabin has an indefinite form with as many variations as there are landscapes and materials. Found in building vernaculars throughout the world, the cabin has undergone many practical transformations and spatial configurations: from the temporary camps of colonial expansion, to lodging for workers who built the infrastructure that connected continents, from holiday homes for the emerging middle class to rentals for short term stays – only a click away. The complex history of the cabin and its enduring appeal in contemporary culture is what makes the building typology an intriguing topic to explore.
As if in a blizzard, the cabin blurs the boundaries between dream and reality, inspiration and experimentation, tradition and technology, and nature and culture. Following a narrative of dreaming of the cabin, drawing the cabin, building the cabin, and living in the cabin, we will see how the contemporary cabin exists on of the frontier of architectural exploration.
fig . 3 Frontispiece for Laugier’s Essay on Architecture
Names for the Cabin
The cabin goes by many names. Whether a camp, cottage, hut, lodge, shack, shed, or shelter, we use the synonyms of cabin to express its geographic diversity and formal variety. The Swiss refer to a mountain cabin with deep eaves as a chalet, the Norwegians call a cabin on a farmstead a soeter, and the idiosyncratic islanders of Cape Breton, Canada refer to a summer cabin as a bungalow. The breadth of cultures that have a tradition of building and visiting the cabin is a testament to its universal practicality and appeal.
More than simply wood, concrete, and steel, cabins are imbued with past and present cultural values and communicate our relationship to the landscape. As Norwegian historian of technology and environment, Finn Arne Jørgensen writes, cabins “are as much ideas as actual places; they are observation points outside of time and space from which we can observe not just nature but ourselves and the world we live in.” The cabin, after all, is not just a private building out in the wilderness somewhere, it is part of a shared cultural narrative, a collection of ideas that has developed over time. In this way, the cabin is a form of physical philosophy, lived in and acted out by the people who use it. The many names for cabin express a shared tradition of seeking out the frontier.
Origins of the Cabin
The cabin goes by many names. Whether a camp, cottage, hut, lodge, shack, shed, or shelter, we use the synonyms of cabin to express its geographic diversity and formal variety. The Swiss refer to a mountain cabin with deep eaves as a chalet, the Norwegians call a cabin on a farmstead a soeter, and the idiosyncratic islanders of Cape Breton, Canada refer to a summer cabin as a bungalow. The breadth of cultures that have a tradition of building and visiting the cabin is a testament to its universal practicality and appeal.
More than simply wood, concrete, and steel, cabins are imbued with past and present cultural values and communicate our relationship to the landscape. As Norwegian historian of technology and environment, Finn Arne Jørgensen writes, cabins “are as much ideas as actual places; they are observation points outside of time and space from which we can observe not just nature but ourselves and the world we live in.” The cabin, after all, is not just a private building out in the wilderness somewhere, it is part of a shared cultural narrative, a collection of ideas that has developed over time. In this way, the cabin is a form of physical philosophy, lived in and acted out by the people who use it. The many names for cabin express a shared tradition of seeking out the frontier.
Destiny, Manifested
At the same time as the growing leisure class was enjoying the last vestiges of European wilderness, illustrations of homesteads on the North American frontier were enticing Europeans to colonize the ‘New World’. Whether the settlers were from Scandinavia or Eastern Europe, they brought their building traditions with them, as detailed in CA Weslager’s influential book The Log Cabin in America (fig 5). Still on the move, the settlers built basic log cabins, hewn from freshly felled timbers. On a patch of land carved out of the forest, the first four logs laid down defined a modest footprint. Successive layers of logs were hoisted atop one another to form the low walls of the cabin. Smaller tree limbs were used to construct the rafter or purlin structure of the roof which was then covered by a lattice of bark, branches, or thatch. There were no windows, and sometimes only a small loft for sleeping to divide the space. Light came in from the open door during the day and from the fireplace within at night. Despite its rustic and rudimentary provisions, or maybe because of them, the log cabin remains a constant source of inspiration for contemporary cabin-goers.
After the initial wave of colonial expansion into the frontier, settlers pushed further into the wilderness to build the infrastructure that would power and connect the North American continent. Loggers, miners, and railroad workers, among labourers in many other trades, required basic shelter while performing their demanding jobs. Many of the early workers’ cabins began as tent houses – timber framed and canvas clad structures that were meant to be as impermanent and transitory as the workers who lived in them. With a translucent canvas skin, the tent houses glowed from within, illuminating the surrounding forest like a lantern. As settlement patterns solidified, some tent houses became a permanent fixture on the landscape and were often upgraded long after their initial construction. Walls were framed in, wood flooring was constructed over the hardened dirt, weather tight roofs were added, wood stoves were installed, and sometimes even electrical wiring was strung through the walls. The incremental process of building a tent house over many seasons reflects the way that many self-builders and ‘weekend warriors’ build their cabins today. Perhaps adding a screened-in porch one year or ‘winterizing’ the next, the cabin becomes suitable for long term dwelling.
fig. 5 From tent houses to log cabins
Getting Away
After the post war housing boom, both mainstream culture and counterculture became equally enamoured with the cabin, albeit for very different reasons. With all the conveniences of modern life available to them in their urban and suburban surroundings, the emerging middle class turned their attention towards building vacation homes in nature. Magazines presented low-cost, do-it-yourself cabins as “the answer to everybody’s dream: a place to get away from it all for as little money as possible.” Recognizing an opportunity, the construction industry used the cabin as a way of prototyping new materials and technologies, which they then marketed to the masses. These bold new cabins, including the newly developed A-frame, had a broad appeal in society, which continues today, albeit with a distinctively retro charm (fig 6).
At the same time, the 1960s counterculture was experimenting with radically new living arrangements. In communes such as Drop City, Colorado, forward thinking architects and hippies built novel structures that, to varying degrees of sophistication, presented a striking departure from building traditions and social conventions. The innovations they developed – including Buckminister Fuller inspired domes (fig 7), ways of using recycled products as building materials, and earth-building techniques – were documented and shared in publications like Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue. While most of the ‘Droppers’, as they referred to themselves, eventually abandoned the commune, their movement’s impact on the cabin and its promise of escape and transcendence remains. The contemporary off-the-grid, tiny house, and DIY movements that are gaining in popularity today owe much to their 1960s predecessors’ architectural innovations and their bold spirit of self-reliance.
fig. 6 Marketing material for a kit-of parts A-Frame design
Contemporary Cabin Culture
The busier our lives become and the more technologically connected we are, the more the lure of the cabin to grows. The secluded cabin in nature is often prescribed as the antidote to the stress of modern life, if only to quarantine ourselves from encroaching technology. It can be argued, however, that the cabin is a profoundly important part of today’s society rather than the antithesis to it. The curators of Cabin Fever note, “the cabin has come far from its pragmatic origin; it’s become a platform from which to observe and understand contemporary life.”
fig. 7 View through a node in Buckminister Fuller Dome
fig. 8 A digital rendering of Valley Cabin by Studio North
fig. 4 Illustration of The Ruined Cottage
“The idea of the cabin exists between two definitions: the edge of land and the edge of understanding.”
As our appetite to escape the presence of technology increases, the more the cabin appears on our social media feeds. Images of cabins have become a kind of digital escapism, a small dose of the experience we crave. Finn Arne Jørgensen remarks that, “The images seem to say that we once lived in simpler conditions, in architecture closer to nature...The images of cabin porn whisper to us of this lost state of grace, of an age of wood and earth and things that were real and true.” Rather than a substitute for the experience, images of cabins are part of it, conditioning our expectations and contributing to our stock of dreams.
The dream of escape from technology, however well intentioned, can be taken too far off the beaten path. The Unabomber, in a dream turned nightmare, launched a bombing campaign from his remote cabin in Montana to undermine technological society. When he was finally found after a decade long manhunt, his small cabin was transported to Sacramento, California as evidence during his trial. In a strangely parallel scenario, the social media site, Twitter shipped two cabins from Montana to their headquarters in San Francisco, California to offer employees a chance to escape, without even having to leave the office. In both cases, the cabin is meant to represent everything that technological society is not, its diametrical opposite. The more we insist on the distinction, however, the more they become intertwined.
Technology has made cabins more accessible than ever. Online short term rentals services make the dream of the cabin accessible at the click of a button. As Zach Klein, the founder of the website Cabin Porn remarked, “pictures of cabins, for their part, often have an effect of recasting wilderness as move-in ready.” The images allow us to imagine a different way of life and if we’re lucky enough to visit, explore it’s potential. What the temporary cabin visitor might miss, however, is the pleasure inherent in the process of bringing the cabin from dream to reality. It is only through engaging with the design and build process that we can transcend the digital ideal (fig 8) and live in the cabin of our dreams. By dreaming of the cabin, drawing the cabin, building the cabin, and living in the cabin, we will see how the contemporary cabin exists on of the frontier of architectural exploration.
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Dreaming of the Cabin
When we reach the cabin at dusk and survey the land, the outline is barely discernible from its surroundings. From a distance, the cabin is an integral part of the landscape and, as we participate in the scene, we become part of it as well. Arriving by foot, the winding path connects us to our destination: the cabin’s door. With a warm light illuminating the cabin from within, the windows cast a glow on the surrounding landscape and invite us into the building’s warmth. Whether by exertion or by imagination, reaching the cabin is both a refuge and a reward. The Danish refer to the dreamy atmosphere experienced at the cabin as Hygge. Although the word doesn’t translate easily, it encompasses a feeling of cozy contentment and well-being we experience while enjoying the simple things in life, like a small, warm cabin on a winter’s night.
A cabin always begins as a dream. Sometimes fantastical and sometimes familiar, the dream is the indispensable starting point to any journey to the cabin. By visiting the cabin, we are able to transform our everyday experience and participate in a collective cultural narrative. More than simply a solitary experience, the image of the cabin we have in our mind’s eye, is a product of our culture, a shared idea of place. Founding myths, literary references, and artistic allusions are all part of the cabin’s meaningful connection to the collective cultural narrative. The cabin, therefore, is an expressive medium that can convey complex concepts about the transformation of space and the meaning of place. The cabins of this book exist on the frontier between dream and reality.
fig. 9 Alvar and Elisa Aalto’s Muuratsalo Experimental House
Muuratsalo
When the sun slowly rises and the snow melts away after a long winter, the people of Scandinavia, perhaps more than any other region, are ready to spend their summers at the cabin. Bordering on a national obsession, the Finns have an unparalleled cabin culture thanks in part to the pioneering designs of Alvar Aalto. The Finnish architect intimately intertwined his work and life, by living in the cabins that he designed with his wives, Aino and Elissa (successive, not simultaneous, it should be noted).
Alvar Aalto’s architectural career, which spanned the mid century modernist period, is defined as much by his relentless pursuit of modernist principles as it is his deep connection to the culture and climate of Scandinavia. In examining the region’s vernacular, Aalto remarked that the Karelian log cabins of Finland parallel the collection of Finnish founding myths collected in the Kalevala. Isolated from outside influence, the region’s people produced buildings whose construction has was dictated directly by the natural conditions. “Karelian architecture shows how human life can be harmoniously reconciled with nature at our latitudes,” Aalto wrote in expounding its virtue as “a forest architecture pure and simple.” By tapping into the national founding mythology of the Finnish people, Aalto reminds us of the importance of a shared cultural narrative as the locus of all regionalist design.
The Muuratsalo Experimental House (fig 9) was Alvar and Elissa Aalto’s studio and summer home. The Aaltos continuously worked on the complex for decades, allowing them to transform it over time and test new ideas. Inspired by another cultural touchstone, the Ancient Roman atrium, the space gives the feeling of a forgotten ruin. Fragments of whitewashed brick walls rise from the forested landscape to form a courtyard and define the entry. With more than fifty different types of bricks arranged in various patterns, the materiality of the walls reflects the experimental nature of the studio and summer home. As Alvar Aalto said, Muuratsalo gave them the ability to “carry out experiments that are not yet sufficiently well developed to be tried out in practice and where the proximity of nature may offer inspiration for both form and structure.” For Alvaar and Elissa, Muuratsalo was a kind of a laboratory for architecture, where they followed his oft repeated maxim: “Don’t forget to play.”
Garden House
The Garden House is a dream-like cabin that simply and playfully evokes the idea of transformation (fig 10). At first glance, it looks like an unassuming garden shed on a picturesque pond. As designer and builder Caspar Schols playfully describes the cabin, it is a hybrid building “between an umbrella and a suitcase.” As if by magic, the cabin has the ability to change based on the weather of the day and the season of the year. According to Schols, “in the same way you choose your clothes each day, this dynamic cabin can be easily adjusted to all weather types, moods, and occasions.” As if floating, the nesting shells of the cabin glide effortlessly along a track imbedded in the elevated platform. Four parallel rails carry the sliding volumes back and forth, like a magician’s shell game revealing and concealing the contents within. Channeling Aalto’s maxim, Schols did not forget to play in designing and building the Garden House.
fig. 10 Caspar Schols moving the walls of his Garden House
Antoine
To the unsuspecting passerby, Antoine (fig 11) appears to be just another rock on the steep slopes of the Alps. As in our dreams, however, what initially appears to be a mundane encounter, can quickly transform into a mythical experience. As a tribute to the alpine experience, Antoine is abound with references to the geography and culture of the Alps. For inspiration, the designers turned to the writings of the Swiss writer, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz. In his novel, Derborence, Ramuz describes a catastrophic landslide that covered the valley in 1714. Antoine, the main character of the novel and namesake for the cabin, survives seven weeks under the immensity of the landslide before he manages to make his way back to his village. Rife with literary and artistic references, Antoine by Bureau A shows that the simple cabin can have a narrative dimension and tell the story of a place. Similar to the ethos of Alvar Aalto, but radically different in form, Antoine manifests the myths of the place to give shape to the cabin.
fig. 11 Antoine by Bureau A camouflaged in the snow.
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Drawing the Cabin
We have all traced the outline of a cabin. Three straight lines joined by a few right angles form the floor and walls. Two angled lines connected by an acute or obtuse angle at the peak form the roof. A rectangle for a door provides a way in and a square for a window suggests the idea of life inside. Resembling a children’s drawing, the small dwelling with its gabled roof is the familiar symbol of the cabin and is instantly inviting. As with many of the cabins found within this book, like Folly or Island House, the gabled form serves as an elemental building block, the symbolic origin of the cabin. Of course, the simple elevation just described isn’t the only starting point for the design of the cabin. Designers can take inspiration by walking the site to understand the lay of the land, making a model of the roof to develop a form, imagining the flow of experiences to sort out the program, or studying the surrounding trees to get a sense of the appropriate materials. Once the seed of an idea, the concept, has been planted, the design can grow and take shape according to the daylight and views. With all these considerations in mind and many more, the cabin is given its form. A drawing of the cabin, whether drawn by hand or printed on paper, gives the idea of a different way of life.
The cabins of this book exist on the frontier between inspiration and experimentation. For architects, the appeal of the cabin is in the clarity of the brief – basic, temporary shelter. Given this simple program and its small scale, the cabin invites experimentation with siting, form, program, and materials. In drawing and redrawing the cabin, designers have the freedom to radically reinterpret the typology and give new form to an old idea. Architects have used the cabin as a testing ground for ideas and some have made it into a physical manifesto, a tangible declaration of their architectural theories. From Marcus Vitruvius and Mark-Antoine Laugier to Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, the cabin has been on the frontier of architectural exploration for centuries. The lines connecting dream and reality, inspiration and experimentation, tradition and technology, nature and culture are drawn and mediated through design.
Taliesin West
Perhaps no other architect is more closely associated with the quintessential architectural activity of drawing than Frank Lloyd Wright. Whether on the drafting table or on the back of a postcard, his evocative sketches have a visionary clarity of intention. With a few deft strokes, his drawings carry the meaning of the architectural language he developed over his lifetime.
When Wright first visited the Sonoma Desert in 1928, he wrote to his son John that, “there could be nothing more inspiring to an architect than [this] spot in the pure desert of Arizona.” The project that brought him there was a sprawling resort hotel called San Marcos-in-the-Desert. Rather than designing remotely, Wright moved his architectural office from Wisconsin to Arizona, drafting tables and all. In order to stay on site during the design process, they built a temporary desert winter camp, named Ocatillo for the species of cactus native to the area. The first buildings on site were tent houses, angular structures constructed of redwood and canvas. Under the cover of the canvas, the diffuse quality of the light provided an ideal space to draw. While the structures themselves didn’t last, they left an impression on Wright. Of his time in the desert, Wright said “‘Ocatillo’ – our little desert camp – you are ‘ephemera,’ nevertheless you will drop a seed or two yourself in course of time.”
A decade later, those seeds grew into Taliesin West. Not far from the site of his first desert encounter, Wright founded his home, studio, garden sanctuary, and laboratory for architecture (fig 12). Taliesin West took four years to build, and then Wright immediately started making changes. On his regular rambles around the site, he traced a trail on the desert as if tracing a line on a page. By incrementally adapting to the landscape, the various iterations of Taliesin West embody Wright’s ideas of organic architecture. Wright believed that a building should be intimately connected to a particular moment and a specific landscape, as if growing naturally out of the ground.
Atalaya
Following in the literal footsteps of the influential architect, students at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture have designed and built their own simple shelters in the desert at Taliesin West for decades. The most recent structure, Atalaya by Chilean designer and builder Jaime Inostroza, is an elegant distillation of Wright’s principles (fig 13). By drawing on his experience of the site, Inostroza set out to create a raised sleeping loft as tall as the nearby trees to watch the play of light and color across the desert landscape.
fig. 12 Frank Lloyd Wright’s draftsman playing piano in the tent house of Ocatillo Desert Camp
Inostroza’s drawing of Atalaya is stripped down to the basic features of the site: the outline of a path and the abstracted forms of the surrounding trees. Atalaya consists of a minimalist grid, the most basic manifestation of structure, overlayed on the landscape. Successive layers of wood beams allow the structure to be scaled like a scaffolding. The canvas shelter at the top of building functions as the aperture of a camera, focusing attention towards the distant horizon. It is not a coincidence that Atalaya, like the Frank Lloyd Wright’s first structures at Ocalillo is built of wood and clad in canvas. As Inostroza revealingly describes his creation, “This is not a house. It is not even a building, but from these principles, I can build a house. I can build a library. I can build anything.”
fig. 13 The overlayed grid of Jaime Inostroza’s Atalaya
Birdhut
Built on the site of the family cabin where Mark Erickson, principal at Studio North, and his family have been returning to for decades, the Birdhut (fig 14) is shaped by both a knowledge of and curiosity about the ecology of the forest. In addition to being an inviting place for people to nest, the Birdhut has twelve birdhouses, each designed for various local birds that live in the mountains of the Columbia Valley, British Columbia. A longstanding interest in the local ecology led the designer to create a more intimate encounter beyond passive observation. Birdhut explores the idea of cohabitation between people and wildlife, where they become roommates in a way. People inhabit the structure for a short time, the rest of the time the Birdhut belongs to the forest.
In a collage drawing by Studio North, all of the animals of the forest are included in the cast of characters. Several species of birds, a bear, people around campfire, and even fishes in the pond are considered as active participants in the narrative of the building. In this way, the drawing is a kind of storybook. The setting itself is fantastical, not necessarily a realistic rendering of how the building was realized, but an idealistic vision of what it could be when all the “inquisitive critters come to visit.” Between inspiration and experimentation, the Birdhut shows that the cabin is constantly being reinterpreted, giving new form to an old idea.
fig. 14 A storybook drawing of Birdhut by Studio North with the full cast of forest characters
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Building the Cabin
Building the cabin is an incremental process where we gradually reconcile the conditions of the site with the dream in our heads and the drawings on paper. Whether concrete or stone, the foundations are the first to go in. Once a solid connection to the ground is established and we become anchored to the site, the floor is framed. Taking the initial steps on the open platform gives us the chance, perhaps for the first time, to experience what its like to walk through the space. As the walls are tilted into place, the cabin becomes enclosed and takes on its final form. When the openings of the windows are punctured through the facade, we are presented with framed views through to the landscape beyond, perhaps capturing a view of a nearby mountain or a glimpse of a stand of trees. Although the roofs of today might be more robust than the branches of Laugier’s Primitive Hut, the roof fulfils its essential role of providing shelter from the elements. Always a work in progress, the rustic nature of the cabin presents the ideal opportunity to experiment with the space as we begin to use it. Things are allowed, if not encouraged, to be rough around the edges and show the signs of the hands that worked on it and the time that aged it. The Japanese refer to it as ‘wabi-sabi’, the beauty of imperfection and change.
Building a cabin is about more than the satisfaction of hammering two-by-fours together until a building takes form, but about tapping into a feeling of connectedness to place and community. Whether stacking timbers to make a log cabin or stacking stones to build a fire pit, there is enjoyment to be found in the effort itself. Building a cabin is done for its own sake, for the experience of creation. The mystique associated with the self-built cabin, from Henry David Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond to the A-frame constructed from a kit of parts, is enduring. By building by hand and on-site we become acquainted with the site’s unique characteristics and, maybe more importantly, we gain an understanding of our own capabilities.
The self-built cabin is rarely realized in isolation, however, even if it is often thought of as an essay in self-sufficiency. Even on the frontier, the construction of the log cabin was a product of community cooperation. Whether built on site or prefabricated in parts, the process works best as a collaborative experience. In an effort to unite tradition and technology, designers and builders have reinterpreted the cabin typology to develop new ways of practicing architecture and new ways of building. From design + build to prefabrication, there are more ways than ever to build a cabin. The cabins of this book exist on the frontier between tradition and technology.
“Things are allowed, if not encouraged, to be rough around the edges and show the signs of the hands that worked on it and the time that aged it.”
Walden
Forever associated with cabin lore, Henry David Thoreau’s self-built cabin at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts is an essay in self sufficiency (fig 15). Thoreau’s experiment in “living deliberately” is an attempt to transcend the conventions of society by building the most basic requirements of living: shelter. As a proto how-to guide, Thoreau describes his education in building in step-by-step detail. Included amongst the philosophical passages about the virtues of living independent of society’s conventions, are prosaic passages about the process, materials, budget of building his cabin. Ever since he constructed his small cabin beside Walden Pond and narrated his experiences, his readers have been rushing to repeat his feat.
By leaving society and living in solitude, Thoreau makes the ultimate commitment to self-reliance. According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s benefactor and mentor, self-reliance is a practical ideal that combines metaphysical philosophy with tangible know-how. For the Transcendentalists, as they referred to themselves, it isn’t enough to simply dream up theories, one has to live them out. Channeling the Roman thinker Seneca, Ralph Waldo Emerson captures the ethos of building, “The reward of a thing done well is to have done it.”
Ultimately, Thoreau was a character he played in his own book. As his critics are fond of pointing out, his supposedly solitary existence was far from isolated and the land he built on was far from the rugged frontier. During the two years it took him to build, Thoreau regularly hosted parties at the construction site so that friends could observe his progress. Only a 20 minute walk away from his family home, his mother helped him out with his laundry, made his meals, and baked him pies. Contrasted with the rhetoric of self-reliance, Thoreau’s actual experience goes to show that the construction of the cabin is a product of collaboration and cooperation.
fig. 15 Cover page of the first edition of Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau
On the shores of Bob’s Lake, Ontario, the Dream/Dive Platform (fig 16) exists between the sky, a place of wonder, and the water, a place of play. The platform elevates two quintessential activities of a summer spent at the cabin: dreaming under the stars and jumping off of the dock. The deceptively simple structure embodies a spirit of resourcefulness that translates simple means into bid ideas. The Dream/Dive platform and the story of its making reminds us that, at a certain point, the dream the cabin requires us to dive into the process of making it a reality.
Spearheaded by Matthew Kennedy of Studio North, Dream/Dive was built as a collaborative weekend project at the family cabin. Made out of “salvaged materials from under the deck, supplemented with two-by-four lumber from the local hardware store,” the structure was built in a few short summer days at the end of August. Having to contend only with the lay of the land, the structure cleverly makes use of the stones from the site as its structure. Dream/Dive demonstrates a design ethos of treading gently on the earth while simultaneously enjoying the process of building. In its playful experimentation, Dream/Dive shows the value in being able to both dream up ideas and then make them a reality.
Dream/ Dive Platform
fig. 16 Satisfaction after a hard day’s work at the Dream/Dive Platform by Studio North
Skuta
With its razor sharp form, innovative use of materials, and remote location, the Alpine Shelter Skuta (fig 17) sets a new standard for what prefabricated buildings can look like. Despite its minimal footprint, the shelter required a sizable team of more than sixty participants, including students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, two architecture firms, and the Slovenian Armed Forces. The harsh climatic conditions introduced a veritable mountain of challenges for the architects, engineers, and installers. Within a context of extreme risk, every aspect of the project was meticulously thought-out and executed. In their words, “all of the effort and planning for this small scale project is meant to keep the memory, spirit, and culture of the mountains as a special place for Slovenians.” The shelter consists of three structurally robust frames that allow for ease of transport as well as divide the space according to the intended uses. The installation of the shelter was carried out by helicopter transport with the Slovenian Armed Forces and a team of mountaineers from the Mountain Rescue Service. Incredibly, the whole transportation and installation process was carried out in a single day.
fig. 17 Helicopter installation of Alpine Shelter Skuta by the Slovenian Armed Forces.
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Living in the Cabin
Having dreamed of the journey to the cabin, drawn it in its surroundings, and built it with the available means and materials, we have yet to live inside the cabin, which is an art in itself. Spending the calm and solitude of an afternoon in the cabin makes all the steps in the journey even more worth their while. The cabin is a place of clear water, craggy rocks, west winds, tall trees, expansive skies, canoe rides, wild storms, slow-burning sunsets, skinny dips, campfire songs, and the same unfinished magazines that have been laid out on the coffee table for the last decade. At the cabin, we might live with less, but we enjoy that much more.
The cabin can be a place of long term dwelling, where a meaningful connection to the space and place is gained through the passage of time. It can also be a one-time getaway, where quotidian life is momentarily traded for a spectacular experience. Whether as a family tradition or a short term stay, a visit to the cabin allows us to become acquainted with another life in another place, even if only temporarily.
On the frontier between nature and culture, the appeal of the cabin lies in the rituals of living closer to nature and living with less. At the cabin, we do things for their own sake. The simplicity of purpose at the cabin serves as an remedy to the excesses of contemporary life and as a necessary counterpoint to the intensity inherent in our digitally connected world. Our material possessions are pared down to the essentials and as such we connect to nature, time, and ourselves in a different way. What we often want in returning to the cabin is more than a place of unencumbered solitude. It is an opportunity to share in each other’s presence, rather than juggle the many distractions of life.
Cabanon
For nearly two decades, French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier spent every summer at the Cabanon, his getaway in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France (fig 18 and 19). Le Corbusier is perhaps best known for his sweeping gestures of urban razing and renewal, which makes him an unlikely pioneer of the cabin. Far from his utopian urban proposals, Le Corbusier retreated to the Mediterranean coast, where he lived in his Cabanon according to carefully designed rituals throughout the summer.
The Cabanon has an interior that belies its outward appearance. Although it resembles a traditional log cabin from the exterior, it is comprised of a single plywood-lined room in the interior. A few small windows act as portholes, giving a view onto rock face behind, trees on either side, and the sea in front. With folding furniture blocked out with bursts of exuberant colour, the design is intentionally spartan. Based on the Modulor – a scale of ideal architectural proportion he developed in response to the articulation of the human body – Le Corbusier defined and designed the rituals that he would live by throughout the summer.
During his summers, Le Corbusier drew building plans, painted murals, socialized with friends, and swam in the Mediterranean. Since the Cabanon was a minimally appointed space, Le Corbusier spent much of his time outdoors, experiencing the beauty of the Cote d’Azure. The garden around the Cabanon is a natural extension of the dwelling, extending far beyond the plywood walls of the Cabanon and out into the sea. Of his time at the Cabanon, Le Corbusier says, “I have a chateau on the Côte d’Azure. It’s extravagant in comfort and gentleness.” One day in late August, 1965, having taken a break from his painting, the architect died while swimming off the coast of the Mediterannean at the age of 77.
fig. 18 The rustic exterior of Le Corbusier’s Cabanon
fig. 19 The Cabanon’s spartan interior
Outside House
On the island of Maui, Erin Moore, principal of FLOAT, poetically interprets the Hawaiian relationship to the land, allowing her client to reinforce her connection to the place. Outside House, is comprised of two pavilions that straddle a three-hundred year old lava flow. The fully enclosed polycarbonate and wood pavilion (fig 20) is intended for sleeping and working while the open air canopied pavilion is designed for cooking and eating. By placing the two pavilions at a distance from each other, the client is encouraged to travel between them and experience the liminal space, making the exterior as much a part of the house as the interior. Two modest pavilions shape the basics rituals of daily life, but the interstitial space between them, allows the owner to live out an intentional relationship with the land. The carefully choreographed design is allows the owner to exemplify the Hawaiian concept of Aloha ’Āina, the idea that love and respect for the land leads to care and stewardship.
fig. 20 The clients on the steps of Outside House by FLOAT
A45
Bjarke Ingels and Søren Rose, the designers of the A45 cabin (fig 21), shared the same daydream of escape from the city. As urban transplants in New York City, the Scandinavian designers shared a mutual need for a countryside escape. While they were on a road trip together to the Catskill Mountains, they conceived of an A-frame with a uniquely Scandinavian aesthetic. Like the first A-Frame designs of the 1950s and 60s, A45 is is a prefabricated and flat pack design that attempts to tap into a market that is looking for a direct connection with nature. A45 is a product of its time, in line with the current movement for environmentally conscious design and the trend toward downsizing possessions. By living with less, Ingles and Rose hope, cabin goers will be able to commune with nature. “When you go into the woods, you actually want to get into the woods,” Ingels says of his design that “ensures that nature is what you end up experiencing.” Many of today’s travelers are seeking out places untouched, he explains: “I think it is just a little bit of a paradigm change. Authenticity is somehow the new luxury.”
fig. 21 Playing in the acute angle of A45 by BIG
“The simplicity of purpose at the cabin serves as a remedy to the excess of contemporary life”
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Beyond the Frontier
While they may not look like the rustic log cabins of the past, the cabins found in this book share a similar essence: they exist on the frontier. From shapeshifting cabins seemingly carved out of the mountainside, to treetop perches for both birds and people, from a lakeside platform for dreaming and diving to a pair pavilions that straddle a lava flow, the cabins in this book are experiments in how to dream, draw, build, and live differently. While its only task is to provide basic shelter, the cabin allows for something far greater: for the world outside to connect with the world within.
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Works Cited
Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture (original French 1753), Tr. Wolfganf and Anni Hermann (Los Angeles: Hennesey & Ingalls, 1977) 11-12
C.A. Weslager, The Log Cabin In America: From Pioneer Days to the Present, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1969).
Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, New York: Macmillan Company, 1910, 83-90.
“Vacation Cabin,” Woman’s Day, August 1958, 17.
Finn Arne Jorgensen, “Why look at Cabin Porn?,” in Public Culture, Volume 27, no. 3, pp. 557-78.
Zach Klein, Cabin Porn, (Columbus, GA: Little, Brown, 2015).
Frank LLoyd Wright: An Autobiography, (New York, NY: Pomegranate, 2005).
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Figures
1 Damon Hayes Couture. 2014.
2 Damon Hayes Couture. 2018.
3 Charles Dominique Joseph Eisen. 1754.
4 Birket Foster. 1859.
5 Britton & Rey. Date Unknown.
6 Flickr Commons. Ethan “SportSuburban”.
7 Sergio Prado and the Geodesic Dome. Carlos Ebert. 1970s.
8 Studio North. 2018.
9 Flickr Commons. Fredrik Rubensson. July 5, 2017.
10 Caspar Schols. 2016.
11 Bureau A. 2014.
12 Unknown. 1929. http://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/digital/collection/flwfflwa/id/75/
13 Andrew Pielage. 2017.
14 Studio North. 2017.
15 Ticknor and Fields. 1854.
16 Studio North. 2015.
17 Andrej Gregoric. 2014.
18 Unknown photographer. Public Domain. 2011.
19 Unknown photographer. Public Domain. 2011.
20 Olivier Koning. 2017.
21 Matthew Carbone. 2018.