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

Ann Cline (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 1998 | ISBN-10: 026253150X | ISBN-13: 978-0262531504

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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

From Publishers Weekly

Every child has felt the magic of a rainstorm from beneath a rickety porch roof, or some makeshift structure. In this passionately written m?lange of autobiography and architectural criticism, Cline describes growing up in and later building structures that would re-create the experience of being barely protected from the big world outside. She begins by quoting work from different cultures that reflect nature as experienced from hut-like structures, as in these lines from ninth-century Chinese poet Po Chu-i: "Already I feel that both in the courtyard and house/ Day by day a fresher air moves./ But most of all I love, lying near the window-side,/ To hear in their branches the sound of the autumn wind." Cline has long been interested in the Japanese tea ritual, and the tea hut became the model for Cline's structures. While many passages describing experiences from huts are engagingly sweet and stir innocent memories (madeleine, anyone?), the rest of the book tends toward an over-reaching criticism of all architecture and even culture. Arguments borrow from a broad range of disciplines and are ultimately bound only by Cline's strong opinions. The result lies uncomfortably somewhere in between a researched study of the Hut; a gentle, poetic description of Cline's own projects; and a polemic on the state of architecture and architects' motivations. This is a brave book, nonetheless, that asks readers to try to understand the interaction of one's surroundings with every aspect of daily life, mundane and metaphysical.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (April 10, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 026253150X
• ISBN-13: 978-0262531504
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,300,286 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Little Treasure, July 5, 2001

By 

brooklyn/last exit (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Hut of One's Own: Life Outside the Circle of Architecture (Paperback)

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.

17 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Content good - Presentation poor, June 20, 2000

By 

Pauline James - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Hut of One's Own: Life Outside the Circle of Architecture (Paperback)

The title gives the impression that you are going to be whisked away into that world everyone dreams about - your secret place. But in reality it doesn't quite do that. The photography is poor and the diagrams are not labeled adequately. Shame as I really wanted to enjoy this book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First read "The Book of Tea", October 11, 2007

By 

Jesse Thomas (Port Townsend, WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Hut of One's Own: Life Outside the Circle of Architecture (Paperback)

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.