The hermit’s cabin lost in the forest is the very essence of the verb to inhabit. It represents the shedding that gives us access to absolute refuge. It is a center of concentrated, primitive solitude, it radiates a universe that meditates, a universe outside the universe. This is how the philosopher Gaston Bachelar expresses it in his Poetics of Space.
Another thinker, the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, was more expeditious a century earlier: he built his own cabin in the woods of Massachusetts, USA, and went to live there for two years to experience what it is like to enter wildlife. He built it next to Walden Pond, hence the name of his legendary literary work. And, to certify his declaration of principles, he settled there on July 4, 1845, Independence Day.
The cabin, a small shelter traditionally made with natural and simple materials from the environment, wood and stone, is today a symbol of essentiality. And a way of contact with the natural environment. A construction that, with its reduced space and isolation, will not distract us from the search in which we sometimes go, and that the city makes difficult for us: direct contact with nature and the loss of the Wi-Fi signal. We may not get to Thoreau’s wilderness adventure. Although maybe yes to a weekend or a few days of getting closer and enjoying a wild existence.
The cabin has had famous enthusiasts over time. The most famous is perhaps Le Corbusier and his Cabanon of precise 3.66 m x 3.66 m. Located in Cap-Martin, a privileged enclave on the Côte d’Azur, it represents the culmination of his research on the notion of the minimal cell, which he reconnects with the myth of the primitive hut.
However, it is in this 21st century that a growing passion for cabins is observed. Both on the part of its potential users and among designers and architects. To the point that Le Festival de Cabanes, in France, is now in its eighth edition, with contemporary projects that seek to inspire new links between architecture, nature and landscape.
Most of the old cabins in the forest, mountains or fields were used to store tools and as temporary housing during the harvest or other agricultural and livestock activities. That is the background of the Aralar Cabin, recently designed by the architecture firm Babel Studio. Immersed in a leafy forest in Guipuzkoa, the new construction maintains the size of 20m2 and pre-existing volumetry. But above all it wants to enhance the simplicity of its original shape, with a square floor plan and a gable roof, almost like a pictogram.
“The owners of the cabin, a couple of young creatives, were looking for a retreat space where, in addition to spending the nights, they could find a place of inspiration and work,” explain the architects. After providing it with good thermal insulation, and an envelope based on sustainable construction systems, Babel Studio wanted to print visual contrast with the green of the forest and “a greater abstraction of forms, applying a black tint.”
The team of young architects llabb are the authors of The Hermitage cabin, in Italy. 12 square meters designed as a space for contemplation and introspection in the Trebbia valley, in the center of the Apennines. The modernity of the prism is inspired, at the same time, by traditional Japanese tea houses and Scandinavian cabins. This refuge “puts human beings back in contact with nature, lightening the burden of anthropization (that is, the transformation that human beings exert on the environment) that all building activity entails,” point out llabb architects.
In the forest region of the Ardennes, in Belgium, the architects and entrepreneurs Toon De Keyser and Francis Belaen, at the head of Hutstuf, have just inaugurated Eagle, the last in a series of five cabins available to anyone who wants to live in them. A specimen among the treetops, with access via a hanging walkway, which aims to combine primitivism, sophistication and good design. Its large windows and skylights immerse it in the forest canopy. Equipped to the last detail, it includes an outdoor shower among the trees with a water pressure that evokes the feeling of being under a waterfall.
The cabin triumphs today with its association with environmental awareness. To that philosophy of life with principles and respect for nature that Thoreau, pioneer of ecology, proclaimed. Also due to a vital need for vitamin N, from Nature, which has been proven to provide good doses of physical, emotional and mental health to human beings. Thoreau already warned of its healing and regenerative power. This is what he writes in Walden: “What pill will keep us fit, serene, happy? Not that of my great-grandfather or yours, but the universal medicines, vegetables, botanicals, of our great-grandmother nature.”