Type : cabin
Location: in the recesses of the mind
Client: Maison de l'architecture Genève
Dossier: MAR
Phase: competition in collaboration with Arno Bovar and Jérome Baccoglio
Date: 2023
"Have you seen anything more appropriate to its function and more perfect in terms of the treatment of materials?
Mies van der Rohe
Through a return to childhood and discovery, we propose a rereading of the creation of the tree house as a return to the Golden Age. Let's think of childhood as a tangible earthly paradise, a return to the blessed time of innocence, when worlds are created like a veil is lifted, and vanish like a breath. The locci is the nave that enables us to travel without moving. It is the pretext for the wandering of the imagination. So, by creating a locci, by seeking to build a reassuring shelter, the child creates both a technical apprenticeship and a microcosm, a means of hiding as well as escaping, a base for daydreaming, out of reach of the adult gaze.
Let's make no mistake, by working with raw materials, we're trying to escape the torments of the myth of the good savage, to focus on the timeless and universal spirit of the phenomena of building, thinking and inhabiting a place. We're following in the footsteps of many thinkers before us, but we've stopped with the desire to put Gotfried Semper's ideas into practice. Semper suggested reviving the idea of walking and gathering, and weaving together the archetypal hut from basic materials. It also echoes crisis situations, and a minimalist habitat for subsistence.
So we started to think about how a child would build a hut in an era further back than our own, after the decline of our civilisation.
What materials would be available? How would they find the pleasure and imagination to build their world?
If we imagine that he takes what is around him, he would find various vestiges of our time, as well as nature, which would have reclaimed its rights.
Seeing bamboo, an invasive weed that has spread all over the place, he could take it and assemble it to create a structure.
Then he could take scraps of fabric, one of the largest industrial productions of the old world, and arrange them on top of the bamboo structure, weaving a colourful, varied and asymmetrical envelope.
He would then build his own hut to live in a heterotopia and join other children of all ages, out of time. From there, it is possible to go back to the primordial children, those children of humanity who perhaps built the first hut?
"Branches, assemble and knot them, here is a hut, untie them and you will have a plain as before".
Japanese poem by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, in In Praise of the Shadow
The skeleton
By using and combining certain elements of our environment, we can gradually create our own personal space. This project is an invitation to seek out and select a pre-existing resource that requires little transformation apart from its removal and assembly. Nature provides. Bamboo has its own rules of development, growing regularly and fractally. So, inspired by the hierarchy of the branches, the game of arrangement begins. The material allows you to play with great flexibility while maintaining good resistance. You then have to bend one end to connect the posts by joining them together. This creates a keystone built around an occulus of reciprocal structure. The assembly is akin to winnowing, a game that is at once rudimentary, technical and sophisticated. Architecture, with its logic and constructive rules, was prefigured when the acanthus leaves were replaced by bamboo. The myth of architecture was no longer born of the classical vision of the column and pediment, but of the woven vault. By creating this structure, the child makes nature his Pantheon. This original and sensitive design perpetuates a universal language.
Let us stop," he says, "for this is a safe haven.
Let's stay here. We have reached the limits of the world."
Cain said to Jabel, father of those who go
In tents of hair in the deep desert:
"Stretch out on this side the canvas of the tent."
And the floating wall was unfolded;
And, when they had fastened it with leaden weights
"Can you see no more?" said Tsilla, the fair-haired child,
The daughter of his Sons, sweet as the dawn;
And Cain answered: "I see this eye again!"
Conscience, Legend of the Centuries, Victor Hugo
Canvas
Ever since the invention of the needle and weaving, canvas has been used for clothing and protection, forming the first layer between our intimate bodies and the outside world. Canvas is still the architectural object of nomads, desert and steppe peoples, because it is easy to transport. The tent is the habitat of the explorer, the shelter of the homeless. Finally, it is the child's hut, a patchwork of sheets and blankets. It's like an extrapolation of the animal cocoon that allows it to grow and transform. It's a microcosm born of experimentation, a means of hiding as much as escaping, of creating a setting for daydreaming far from the world. It's what carried sailors across the world's waters, what enabled inventors of aeronautics to soar through the air, from hot-air balloons and aeroplanes to parachutes, not forgetting the flying carpets of a thousand and one nights. As a medium, it has been used by artists to express their paintings and visions, and has become a foundation for the expression of thought and concept. The waxed canvases of grandmothers, under which we take shelter to find each other, are reminiscent of childhood memories. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the canvas will continue to be used for neo-primitive purposes.
"My drawing wasn't of a hat, it was of a boa snake digesting an elephant, so I drew the inside of the boa snake so that grown-ups could understand. They always need explanations.
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupéry
"the essential is invisible to the eye
Beyond the perceptible lies the sensible. There, stretched out on the floor of the hut of interlaced bamboo and woven canvas, the child observes between darkness and light, the play of Chinese shadows, half visible and already fading. In this place created ex nihilo, from odds and ends, the child's imagination, dreams and laughter condense and materialise. The child's hut is the most beautiful of heterotopias. It is the vehicle to an inner elsewhere, and transforms itself into a dream catcher.
In an imaginary world, not so far away, where bamboo (a perennial grass) is taking up more and more space thanks to globalisation and global warming, where the more sustainable economic model has collapsed, where textile production had previously been flourishing, this hut could be a child's refuge from the world of dreams... Even when the decline of the world is effective, there will remain the eternal imagination of the golden age so often told and so longed for, the age of innocence.
