Alex Johnson on some of the great writers and thinkers for whom the humble shed was a crucial factor

For many people, the archetypal shed is American writer E. B. White’s small and simple timber shack in Maine, New England. Its window offered a beautiful view out to sea, but inside it was furnished only with a modest chair, bench and self-built desk, an old barrel serving as a waste basket, and an old croquet-set box functioning as a cupboard. There was no decoration. ‘Tight and plainly finished’ was how White termed it. It was here that he drafted his masterpiece, Charlotte’s Web, on his black Underwood typewriter.

However, sheds appear in so many other guises, as beach huts, shepherds’ huts, garden offices, saunas, home gyms, art studios, yoga workshops, not to mention mini houses.

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You can even live in them. Influential American philosopher and early conservationist Aldo Leopold’s book A Sand County Almanac is a 1949 collection of essays promoting his concept of a ‘land ethic’, how people should look after the land they live on. In the 1930s Leopold (1887–1948) bought a chicken coop, renovated it and turned it into a sheddish retreat, which he called The Shack. It’s currently the only chicken coop on the National Register of Historic Places.

‘The Shack was sort of an example of how you didn’t need a palace and all these things surrounding you,’ said Leopold’s daughter, Nina Leopold Bradley, when it was accepted onto the Register. ‘The general effect was that you can be very, very happy with very little stuff around you.’

Is this why people love sheds so much? In truth there are numerous factors. Much of it is surely down to the simplicity of the structure, as it has been the basic building block of all architecture since the time of the influential first-century-BCE Roman architect Vitruvius, who argued that any building worth its salt should possess ‘firmitas’, ‘utilitas’ and ‘venustas’; that is, it should be sturdy, functional and aesthetically appealing.

Benedictine monk Marc-Antoine Laugier went a shed-like step further in his 1753 treatise Essai sur l’architecture, promulgating the theory of the ‘Primitive Hut’. Essentially, he contended that his architect peers were guilty of over-elaboration in their work and should always create with the simplicity of the rustic hut uppermost in their thoughts, since it links us intimately with the natural world.

‘The primitive hut is not only the origin of built form but is also the very personification of all that is right in architecture,’ he wrote. The frontispiece of the second edition included a bucolic illustration of just what Laugier envisaged, a hut with four tree trunks as pillars, topped with a roof made of branches and leaves.

Even German architect and theoriser Gottfried Semper, who used part of his radical 1851 book The Four Elements of Architecture to pooh-pooh the theory that the primitive hut was the inspiration for ancient Greek temples, still believed that it represented ‘the sacred symbol of civilization’.

Certainly it’s a back-to-nature vision that has endured. In the twentieth century, architectural historian Joseph Rykwert, in his book On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History, stressed that the primitive hut is ‘a reminder of the original and therefore essential meaning of all building for people’.

Similarly, architect Le Corbusier said that all modern man really wanted was a monk’s cell (he walked the walk by building his own hugely pared-down holiday home), while poet Dylan Thomas described his study on stilts in Wales as his ‘bard’s bothy’, a reference to the simple off-grid shelters used by agricultural workers in rural areas.

Around the world there are numerous examples of thinkers retreating to their sheds to do their hard thinking. In the early 1700s, one of the most widely read philosophers of ethics and aesthetics of his day, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, built his two-storey Philosopher’s Tower in a field on his Dorset estate where he went to cogitate (if you ever find yourself in the area, you can spot it today from the B3078 between Wimborne and Cranborne).

His contemporary the eighteenth-century Swedish philosopher and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg built a wooden garden summerhouse (or lusthus in Swedish) which was, according to Rev. Nicholas Collin of Philadelphia, who visited him in 1766, ‘a kind of temple, to which he often retired for contemplation’.

More recently, the prolific spiritualist writer Thomas Merton, author of Thoughts in Solitude (1958), which makes the cases for solitude and reflection in our increasingly hectic modern age, spent several hours a day in deep thought in a tool shed just outside the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky, USA.

In the same country, in rural Connecticut, writer Michael Pollan offered an interesting mix of philosophy and shed-building in his book A Place of My Own (1997), an account of how he built his writing hut but also discussing the role of work in our society, and how architecture can shape our lives.

It’s not hard to understand why so many of our finest minds have been partial to a shed. Where else can you get some proper me time, away from the hurly-burly of life and the constant demands of other people? Laugier talked about the importance of humans constructing a dwelling ‘which covers but not buries’. That’s a shed. Sometimes, you need to think small to think big.

This is an edited extract from The Philosophy of Sheds (British Library, £10.99) by Alex Johnson. Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

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A Drink with the Idler

Alex Johnson is our guest on “A Drink with the Idler” this Thursday when he’ll be chatting to Tom Hodgkinson about sheds and their part in the worlds of art, literature and innovation.

Mark Vernon will also present a new Thought for the Week.

That’s Thursday 28 May, 6pm-7pm.

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