A Hut of One's Own

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Though Joe's hut is going up in a quiet corner of rural America, you could see it as part of an international minitrend: The tiny building is on the minds of many architects and designers today. Japan's ultracool architectural partnership Atelier Bow-Wow specializes in little buildings, and they've published a book in Japan celebrating the smallest structures on the urban scene: toll booths, newspaper kiosks, porta-potties, and the like. Spanish designer Mart’n Ruiz de Azœa has invented what must be the most intimate dwelling ever: a gold tent that you can fold up and put in your pocket. Closer to home, Boston-based artist Krysztof Wodiczko contrived a unique combination of cabin and pushcart to give homeless men and women mobile shelter and storage. And Iowa City artist Jay Shafer lives in a house he says is "smaller than most people's bathrooms," which he built as a small-scale replica of the house in the background of Grant Wood's American Gothic.

I don't know why so many dwelling designers have gone small -- it may be a reaction against the gigantism of today's international trophy architecture and a renewed interest in human scale -- but to me trends in tiny house design are less interesting than what goes on in the minds and spirits of the people who inhabit them. Joe Hart and people like him are part of a long tradition of solitude seekers who, by following an initial impulse simply to get away, soon find that their wee retreats are experiments in what it takes for a human being to be happy and free; eventually, the cabin becomes a lens through which the hermit (permanent or temporary) sees the world, and herself, with more depth and clarity. The house is an ancient symbol of the self, and it's as if by stripping the dwelling down to bare essentials, the human being is stripping himself too, psychically and spiritually, to what really counts.

Though the Christian hermits of the Egyptian desert were the first to make this inquiry -- an inquiry continued as a search for right relationship with God by thousands of nuns and monks, from Julian of Norwich to Saint Therese of Lisieux to Thomas Merton -- Henry David Thoreau is still the best known of solitaries and hut builders; for him, the big building was a symbol of all the snares and misdirections of his society. "If one designs to construct a dwelling house," he writes in Walden, "it behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he finds himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a museum, an alms-house, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot Indians, in this town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and I thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind."

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