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

Finalist, Architecture/Interior Design Category in the 1999 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs) presented by Independent Publisher Magazine.


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.

Subtitled Life Outside the Circle of Architecture, this book takes "a stroll through the borderlands that surround architecture" to bestow a quiet nobility on huts, shacks, shanties, teahouses, follies, and casitas. Writer Ann Cline is a professor of "capital-A Architecture," as she proffers in an up-front confession. But she has built and occupied a hut, and her thoughts on what she terms "life in the margins" are illuminating. In one example, she reveals that in "the years I had gazed out at a row of pomegranate trees at the rear of my yard, I never knew overripe pomegranates sometimes burst open. Reading in my hut one autumn evening, the sudden sound of a pomegranate cracking open riveted my attention."

"Everyone knows what 'the hut' stands for," Cline writes. She references the solitary St. Anthony, Lady Chatterly, and Heidi in three successive sentences and quickly moves on to Po-I and Shu-chi, "the world's first recorded recluses," and Lao Tzu, who "recommended refuge" in troubled times.

Cline's prose waxes wordy when she forays into art criticism, but at her best she writes with tender understanding about shack builders and dwellers: the mentally ill, the urban homeless, children in playhouses, and the Japanese wabi, who are drawn to a rustic life and who transform poverty into simplicity, a virtue, and a blessing. Some of her ideas may ring bells for readers who loved such counterculture staples as Handmade Houses: The Woodbutcher's Art, or such celebrations of simplicity as Tiny, Tiny Houses. But Cline's book is infinitely broader than either of those, although lacking their visual pleasures (all the photographs are small black-and-whites). A Hut of One's Own is a thinker's book, with a place on both the architecture and philosophy shelves, but thinker-builders should be entranced by it too. --Peggy Moorman