Synopses & Reviews
This small book on small dwellings explores some of the largest questions that can be posed about architecture. What begins where architecture ends? What was before architecture?The ostensible subject of Ann Cline's inquiry is the primitive hut, a one-room structure built of common or rustic materials. Does the proliferation of these structures in recent times represent escapist architectural fantasy, or deeper cultural impulses? As she addresses this question, Cline gracefully weaves together two stories: one of primitive huts in times of cultural transition, and the other of diminutive structures in our own time of architectural transition. From these narrative strands emerges a deeper inquiry: what are the limits of architecture? What ghosts inhabit its edges? What does it mean to dwell outside it?Cline's project began twenty-five years ago, when she set out to translate the Japanese tea ritual into an American idiom. First researching the traditional tea practices of Japan, then building and designing huts in the United States, she attempted to make the "translation" from one culture to another through the use of common American building materials and technology. But her investigation eventually led her to look at many nonarchitectural ideas and sources, for the hut exists both at the beginning of and at the farthest edge of architecture, in the margins between what architecture is and what it is not.In the resulting narrative, she blends autobiography, historical research, and cultural criticism to consider the place that such structures as shacks, teahouses, follies, casitas, and diners--simple, "undesigned" places valued for their timelessness and authenticity--occupy from both a historical and contemporary perspective. This book is an original and imaginative attempt to rethink architecture by studying its boundary conditions and formative structures.
Review
Ann Cline has succeeded admirably in assessing the crisis ofarchitectural meaning in what seem to me to be the only authenticterms possible... It is the way Cline handles [her] themes—themature personal insight she invests them with—that give her book itsoriginality, its edge, and its profound humanity. David B. Stewart, Professor of Architectural History, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Review
Ann Cline's book opens architecture once more to the disheveled and unruly imagination of dreams, that combines the ancient and the immediate, the uncanny and the homely. The MIT Press
Review
Cline offers sensitive new insights into the meaning of the 'primitive hut.' Drawing on a variety of cultural, historical, and architectural references from past and present, her study is a profoundly original scholarly and philosophical meditation on the importance of the hut in contemporary society as filtered through her own experience as builder and user. Frederick Turner, Founders Professor, School of Arts and Humanities, The University of Texas at Dallas
Review
Ann Cline offers us a thought-provoking argument: She demonstrates how the deceptively simple act of designing and building a habitable hut can reawaken sensibilities intrinsic to profound architectural experience. Using examples that cut across cultures and time, we see how the humble primitive hut leads to a renewed awareness of architecture's potential for heightening existential and transcendent meaning, serving ultimately as a critique on the superficial arguments that are used characteristically to justify so much of the celebrated architecture of our time. Elizabeth A. T. Smith, Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Review
One never knows if a text will achieve a 'vogue' success, but this one surely deserves classic status. Norman Crowe, Architect and Professor, University of Notre Dame
Synopsis
An exploration of the smallest and simplest of dwellings offers answers to some of the largest and oldest questions about architecture.
This small book on small dwellings explores some of the largest questions that can be posed about architecture. What begins where architecture ends? What was before architecture? The ostensible subject of Ann Cline's inquiry is the primitive hut, a one-room structure built of common or rustic materials. Does the proliferation of these structures in recent times represent escapist architectural fantasy, or deeper cultural impulses? As she addresses this question, Cline gracefully weaves together two stories: one of primitive huts in times of cultural transition, and the other of diminutive structures in our own time of architectural transition. From these narrative strands emerges a deeper inquiry: what are the limits of architecture? What ghosts inhabit its edges? What does it mean to dwell outside it? Cline's project began twenty-five years ago, when she set out to translate the Japanese tea ritual into an American idiom. First researching the traditional tea practices of Japan, then building and designing huts in the United States, she attempted to make the "translation" from one culture to another through the use of common American building materials and technology. But her investigation eventually led her to look at many nonarchitectural ideas and sources, for the hut exists both at the beginning of and at the farthest edge of architecture, in the margins between what architecture is and what it is not. In the resulting narrative, she blends autobiography, historical research, and cultural criticism to consider the place that such structures as shacks, teahouses, follies, casitas, and diners--simple, "undesigned" places valued for their timelessness and authenticity--occupy from both a historical and contemporary perspective. This book is an original and imaginative attempt to rethink architecture by studying its boundary conditions and formative structures.
Synopsis
In the resulting narrative, she blends autobiography, historical research, and cultural criticism to consider the place that such structures as shacks, teahouses, follies, casitas, and diners--simple, undesigned places valued for their timelessness and authenticity--occupy from both a historical and contemporary perspective. This book is an original and imaginative attempt to rethink architecture by studying its boundary conditions and formative structures.