Discussion: Primitive Hut of the Future? Bionic Research Pavilion in Wood
- Frank Kaltenbach
In the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s rallying cry was “Retour à la nature!” His quest for an ideal “natural state” – as rejection of the aristocratic excesses of the Rococo – led him not only to romanticise the “noble savage”, but also to imagine the origins of architecture in man’s first house – completely surrounded by nature and made exclusively of unprocessed natural materials. In his “Essai sur l’architecture”, Marc Antoine Laugier – a contemporary of Rousseau – included an image that to this very day most famously illustrates the “primitive hut”: a pitched roof with a gable of twigs and branches supported by the trunks of four trees.
