A Hut of One's Own: Life Outside the Circle of Architecture

By Ann Cline

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 026253150X
• ISBN13: 9780262531504
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.4" x 8.4"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

First read "The Book of Tea"

I read this book after I spent a quarter researching Traditional Japanese teahouses and their contemporary equivalents at Evergreen State College, and was well prepared for its message. Ann Cline's commentary on architecture and ethics is profound, outside of the times, and certainly out of the realm of America's manufactured-dependent, celebrity hyped culture. Nothing she tells you will make you money or make you famous. But if, like me, you are troubled by architecture that mocks us by flaunting its massive concrete cantilevers or shadows us with its creator's ostentatious erections, then read this book (slowly) and think about building a hut. In your mind.

A Little Treasure

Space is at a premium in my tiny apartment, but there will always be room on my bookshelf for "A Hut of One's Own." Ann Cline's meditation on architecture, art, and culture is fragmented in places, and doesn't deliver big glossy visuals or a knockout blow to the senses. Rather, it's a quiet book that unfolds with fresh opinions, and acute observations. It's thought-provoking reading for artists, architects, and intellectuals of all stripes. I've had the book for years, and still find myself returning to it.