Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

If I were a student of architecture, I might find merit in this wordy disquisition about tea houses and follies and other quaint little structures. But I'm not. I'm just a schlep who is deeply curious about the EXPERIENCE of building and living in a hut. The subtitle, *On Life Lived outside the Bounds of Architecture,* led me to believe that's what the book would actually be about. Mea culpa, for having brought such intensely passionate expectations to what is a perfectly innocent but drab little book.