weather rooms concentrated structures
architecture | cabins by matthew johnson
nature fi lters detai ls sufficiency cl imate
a space free from these distractions, a contemplative space such as a back shed or cabin in the woods, where architecture has the potential to become a kind of conduit or filter through which one becomes aware of the simple fluctuations of the world around us. For this reason, I’ve always had an appreciation for single-room structures built by architects: spaces meant primarily for retreat and concentration. Le Corbusier’s Cabanon in Cap Martin was one example. It was a rough one-room cabin in a grove of olive trees, with a bed, a sink, a small desk and windows fitted with shutters. Le Corbusier used to retire to his cabanon to think, to paint, to unwind. The door was positioned directly in front of the back entrance to the adjacent café and, in the other direction, to the Côte d’Azur. In the later years of his life Le Corbusier spent long summers at the cabin and the even smaller atelier next to it, drawing until in 1965 he drowned in the sea in front of his small shed. A few years ago, architect Steven Holl built himself a similar place in upstate New York, overlooking a lake. In his case, the one-room structure has no sink or bed, nor electricity, water, heat or insulation. It is only for escape, for painting and reading and for contemplating the tiny variations of the lake surface or of the surrounding leaves. These examples have something in common with a monk’s cell or even Finnish summer cottages called mökki , in which very little happens except the simple experience of life, stripped bare of modern conveniences and even of the need to socialise.
A few years back, poet Peter Handke published Once Again for Thucydides . The book is a kind of journal of his travels, but it is also an attempt to write a series of what he calls micro-epics, narratives that concentrate on the minutiae of the natural world, such as a sudden snowfall on a train in Japan, appearances of glow-worms on the plains of Friuli or tidal transformations off the coast of Spain. His micro-epics express astonishment at the world through his observance of small events in their ‘simple, unadorned validity’. This kind of concentration on small natural events is no longer a central part of our lives, since we now exist in an age of sensory overload, a time of continuous partial attention to use a phrase from computer researcher Linda Stone, in which distractions appear almost by the second in the form of email, chats, twitter, phonecalls, faxes, instant messages. Electronic signals envelope us. Our ability to connect to each other is now almost total, even as our engagement with the surrounding physical world seems more and more tenuous. Many of us find it hard to concentrate for any length of time: on a book, on a complex piece of music, on a difficult film, certainly on the minutiae of nature. Our lives are becoming a bit like the sidebars of web-pages, in which advertisement after advertisement blink on and off in a distracting array of color, motion, form and content. From this situation, architecture offers little respite. In the modern house (much less the modern office building, mall, school) few rooms are truly sanctuaries without distraction. Screens are everywhere. Yet many of us, I suspect, often wish for
this page, above: Le Corbusier’s petit cabanon and atelier at Rocqueburne, Cap Martin, Côte d’Azur 1952. left: Steven Holl’s unserviced cabin at Round Lake in upstate New York 2005.
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On Site review 23 Small Things
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