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

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