The Architectural Review
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Typology Shed From first building to tool storage to site of escape from the everyday, the shed continues to evolve, venturing beyond the walls of the domestic garden, writes Tom Wilkinson HUGO GLENDINNING / DACS / ARTIMAGE SURENDRA (Opening spread) Cornelia Nicholson’s 1948 ICI Shed; ANGELA VERREN TAUNT / BRITISH COUNCIL / DACS / ARTIMAGE / BRITISH COUNCIL DACS ANGELA VERREN TAUNT Parker’s shed, exploded at Hill House tool shed by / RIBA COLLECTIONS TIM BENTON her behest by the Army – Charles Rennie annihilated sanctuary Mackintosh; Le Refuge by (Clockwise from above) Stéphane Thidet, 2014, built to withstand where it rains inside; John earthquakes and fires, Wilkes’ Primitive Huts, kura storehouses are or the Origin of dotted around Japan; Ben Architecture, 1797 hose of us fortunate enough to architectural historians immune to its Arcadian top-note to the creosote. have private gardens need only charms: ever since we started looking back, Virgil has the shepherd Corydon offer the look from our back doors to see we’ve imagined building beginning so. aloof Alexis ‘Some lowly cot in the rough the essence and the origin of all Where does the shed begin, though? fields’, and ever since the rustic shelter has Tarchitecture: the shed. For these elemental A 15th-century dictionary provides an early had a romantic angle. Not all sheds are structures – four walls and a roof, sighting: ‘Schudde, hovel, or swyne kote, created equal, however. The poet JH Prynne foundations optional – are the domestic or howse of sympyl hyllynge to kepe yn makes the fine distinction that the bucolic iteration of the so-called primitive hut. beestys’. The shed or hovel is a house fit for hut is a relative newcomer to the English They are iterated elsewhere too, at the beasts, and millions of spiders would agree. language, arriving in the 17th century to British seaside, in allotments, Russian But these days the shed is more likely to supplant the hovel (which, as we saw above, dachas, German Schrebergärten, the be home to the machinery that replaced was equivalent to the shed). The hovel, treehouse and the hermitage. domestic livestock than its smelly Prynne points out, was emphatically The basic building clearly has a wide and antecedents, especially the bike and the unromantic, a shelter for the homeless. enduring appeal, ensnaring holidaymakers, lawnmower, as well as half-used tins of Lear ends up in one, with the storm outside part-time Rousseauians and children alike. paint, boxes of rusty nails, and inquisitive and the disintegration of his language Artists and writers are also fond of tinkering tendrils of ivy. The shed, the latter echoing on macro- and microcosmic scales in the shed, among them Woolf, Mahler, announce, is a structure closer to nature the enormity of this dislocation. Le Corbusier, Heidegger and, of course, than our houses are, or at least pretend to For Prynne, the hut is ‘not a dwelling and Thoreau, the ur-sheddie. Nor are be. The lingering aroma of manure lends an not set up for family life, but estranged from 60 (Left) a family next to an arbour in their allotment garden in 1919 Berlin (Right) George Bernard Shaw’s rotating Writing Hut in Hertfordshire afforded solitude and followed the sun throughout the day SZ PHOTO / SCHERL BRIDGEMAN PHOTO SZ ‘ There is something about the simplicity of the shed that seems to facilitate (or at least metaphorise) a distillation of ideas’ / ALAMY PRESS KEYSTONE (Left) Alexander ArtKlyazma, 2003 Brodsky’s recycled (Below) Homer’s window-frame Pavilion tool shed in for Vodka Ceremonies, The Simpsons it and its domestic values’, which explains supposed source? Source of history and Vitruvius encountered these other much of its appeal. An escape from home, if historiography, in fact. Vitruvius contends architectures: he was a military engineer only to the bottom of the garden, is essential that building began this way: following the working at the empire’s frontiers, a strange to many intellectual labourers. Furthermore, discovery of fire (he was a fan of Lucretius’s place in which to surmise that building there is something about the simplicity of theories regarding the origin of human began with peaceful rivalry. Indeed, it is very the shed that seems to facilitate (or at least society), humans came together as likely that the huts Vitruvius observed were metaphorise) a distillation of ideas. communities, whereupon we started making crushed by the Roman war machine of which However, turning to Heidegger’s famous houses and improving them in a spirit of he was a cog. Black Forest cabin, Prynne points out that friendly competition. Intriguingly there was This secret origin of architecture in the type ‘is confederate with deep ethical no one ur-hut for Vitruvius: there were colonial warfare is echoed in a much later problematics, and not somehow a purifying burrows, shelters of leaves, and wattle and account of the first building. Semper claimed solution to them’. The urge to simplify daub inspired by the work of swallows. that the four essential elements of sometimes bypasses essentials – the Gordian He goes on: ‘we can see for ourselves that architecture – the hearth, the foundational knot can bleed. In the 1930s Heidegger these practices developed from the origins mound, the frame, and its cladding – were hosted Nazi meetings at what Thomas which I have written about because to this present in the earliest structures, the avatar Bernhard called ‘that lie of a log cabin’. day buildings are constructed of these of which he identified at theGreat What are the implications of this materials in foreign countries’. Exhibition during his London exile. dichotomous hut for the writing of This idyllic picture is somewhat The Caribbean hut he found sheltering in the architectural history, of which it is the undermined by the context in which Crystal Palace provided the evidence for his 61 Refuge Lieptgas, Flims, Switzerland Georg Nickisch and Selina Walder 2012 BOTH IMAGES: GAUDENZ DANUSER GAUDENZ IMAGES: BOTH section AA The Swiss mountain hut, refuge of cowherds, rebellious peasants and, latterly, hikers and skiers, has a romantic pedigree. No wonder that Rousseau and Le Corbusier are both sons of this alpine nation. Today, however, the architecture of Switzerland is more readily associated with fair-faced concrete structures of a mind-boggling finish than with rude timber sheds perched on high pastures. This ossified version of the latter type brings these elements together, resulting in something like a Rachel Whiteread monument to the twin ground floor national traditions of rustic idyll and Calvinist luxury. In fact, this holiday home stands on the site of an abandoned wooden farming shelter, indeed it grows out of it: the old building’s timber was recycled for its formwork. Its relative expansiveness is unobtrusive thanks to its submerged lower portion, containing a bedroom and bathroom; the chthonic atmosphere of this space is heightened by the view out onto the boulders that enclose the lightwell. A A lower ground floor plan 0 1m 62 (Clockwise from right) at Whitechapel Gallery’s Jill Randall’s Sheds series This is Tomorrow; Rachel explores notions of Whiteread’s 2012, Detached territory and ownership, 1, concrete and steel cast celebrating the ad hoc; the of a garden shed, draws on Smithsons’ Patio and the everyday, rendering it Pavilion, exhibited in 1956 somewhat disconcerting DAVE BENNETT ARTWORK BY RACHEL WHITEREAD. PHOTO: MIKE BRUCE. COURTESY GAGOSIAN MIKE BRUCE. COURTESY PHOTO: WHITEREAD. RACHEL BY ARTWORK ‘ The presence of the Caribbean hut at the Great Exhibition was made possible by expansionary warfare, resulting in indigenous Caribbeans being eradicated by the British’ / RIBA COLLECTIONS JOHN MALTBY new approach to origins, which nevertheless protagonists, and once again this originary garden path, away from the over-civilised did not depart from the venerable tradition moment takes place in the primitive house, but the Bauhaus’s Sommerfeld House of imperialistic epistemology – the presence structure. Can the shed disclose as well in Berlin of 1922 leaned the other way; more of this hut at the centre of the world’s as conceal the violence at the origin of ambiguous are exhortations to learn from largest empire was made possible by architecture? ‘informality’ from anarchists like John expansionary warfare, after all, and the Primitivity has been cultivated by Turner or liberals like Alejandro Aravena, indigenous Caribbeans had been eradicated designers in many ways, with equally various and also the more gentrified example of by the British. The birth of architecture, intentions. The frontispiece of Laugier’s HKPA’s Brutalist common room at Downing in both of these cases, meant the destruction famous 1753 treatise shows the hut literally College, Cambridge, recently described of someone else’s architecture. growing out of the ground: like Vitruvius’s as primitivising by architectural historian This colonial shadow-hut is first outlined origin myth this is a way of making Otto Saumarez Smith. Either way, simplicity in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where Kurtz architecture look natural, and we might is never as simple as it seems. is discovered in his shack surrounded by perceive a similar genealogy in the idealised Few architects have approached the hut human heads on stakes. The latter make garden shed. Returning to untainted with the criticality of Alison and Peter a ghastly mockery of Vitruvius’s idea that antiquity is part of the hut’s allure, but Smithson who, with Eduardo Paolozzi and the members of Classical architecture were rather than a manifestation of a continuous Nigel Henderson, exhibited a strange inspired by the human figure. These tradition this should be understood as installation titled Patio and Pavilion at the bloody finials also reveal a growing self- a critique of the present, and not always a Whitechapel Gallery show This is Tomorrow consciousness on the part of colonialism’s reactionary one.