The Essay on Architecture provides a story of man in his primitive state to explain how the creation of the “primitive man’s” house is created instinctively based on man’s need to shelter himself from nature. Laugier believed that the model of the primitive man’s hut provided the ideal principles for architecture or any structure. It was from this perspective that Laugier formed his general principles of architecture where he outlined the standard form of architecture and what he believed was fundamental to all architecture. To Laugier, the general principles of architecture were found in what was natural, intrinsic and part of natural processes.
An illustration of the primitive hut by Charles Dominique Eisen was the frontispiece for the second edition of Laugier’s Essay on Architecture (1755). … The message the illustration was suggesting was clear: that the essay would suggest a new direction or a new order for architecture. In the image a young woman who personifies architecture draws the attention of an angelic child towards the primitive hut. Architecture is pointing to a new structural clarity found in nature, rather than the ironic ruins of the past.
Lovely to stumble upon this. One of those “I’ll read you next” books I’ve had sitting around the house is R. D. Dripps’ The First House (1997). Marc-Antoine Laugier’s “satisfying hut” is mentioned parenthetically on the first page, though it’s understood by Dripp to have taken on a speculative historical role rather than a guiding one. Either way, that long stitch embroidery piece I picked up a couple weeks ago is looking even more timely and fitting.
From the preface:
The disengaged or reductive quality of current architectural discourse unfortunately does not seem to produce arguments and theories sufficiently broad in scope and adventuresome to continue to address important political, cultural, and ecological issues. Thoughts, actions, and artifacts appear to be floating freely, with no apparent engagement with the intellectual and physical world they must have come from and which one would hope they might help to direct. Without a connection to the immense intellectual project of understanding the world and our place within it, thinking closes in on itself, producing hypotheses that are increasingly autonomous, hermetic, and diminished in reach.
