Shed Building Plans

Cabin Porn the book

Many readers will be familiar with the Cabin Porn site and now there is a book inspired by it called Cabin Porn: Inspiration for your quiet place somewhere which is published by Particular Books next week.  The original site was the brainchild of Zack Klein, technology entrepreneur and co-founder of Vimeo, and friends who built a cabin in the woods and then invited other people to contribute their own shedlike structures to the site (the most visitors come from the UK). The book is extremely well illustrated with examples of rural microarchitecture from all over the world, focusing on 10 cabins in detail with photographs by Noah Kalina and words by Steven Leckart. Well worth a browse.


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Cabin Porn the book

Why Look at Cabin Porn

 This is a marvellous essay (and I mean essay, its not a 2 minute thing to whizz through on Buzzfeed) about why we like looking at shedlike structures by Finn Arne Jørgensen, associate professor of history of technology and environment at Umeå University, Sweden, and published by Duke University Press (you can download a pdf of the whole thing from their site here).

Heres a couple of snippets to whet your appetite:

The rise of cabin porn as a visual genre reflects a growing international interest in cabins, shedworking, and rustic, exurban living off the grid — most of it romanticizing rural and low-tech lifestyles.

The images seem to say that we once lived in simpler conditions, in architecture closer to nature. We lived more productive and more honest lives. In the peace and quiet away from the distractions of modern life, we could listen to ourselves. The images of cabin porn whisper to us of this lost state of grace, of an age of wood and earth and things that were real and true. The cabins of cabin porn are as much ideas as actual places.... On the surface, the disembodied architecture of cabin porn seems to be a form of nostalgia, where the dream of the cabin becomes an arena for resolving an ambivalent relationship to technology and all the bothersome things of modern life.... In looking at cabin porn, trying to articulate exactly what is essential and desirable about the cabin, we are also looking at ourselves and who we aspire to be. 

 Image from the Cabin Porn site by Peter Weiss

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Why Look at Cabin Porn