Rock the Shack chooses to focus its viewpoint on structures that exist outside an urban context. Each house, cabin, retreat and lookout has an intimate relationship with nature and emphasises the isolation that they are built to capture and enhance.
With 105 case studies crammed into a book less than 250 pages, each individual inclusion does not have a large amount of space devoted to it, but Rock the Shack doesn’t feel like it intends to go for a rich analysis. Instead, the book is divided into four sections; those shacks that blend into the surroundings, those that sits quietly in forests, those that command their presence in or on the mountains and those that perch on the boundaries between land and water. In this way, the book has a more atmospheric quality, where each inclusion is a single part of a larger tapestry.
Wood makes up a large part of the structure and visual elements of the buildings in Rock the Shack. Forests, lakes and mountaintops bring out the best qualities that wood has as a construction material, with its warmth and tactility enlightening the interiors at the same time as the building is eased with its malleability and, in some cases, conduciveness to prefabrication. Each of the fours sections sees wood used throughout.
The first section, entitled ‘Skies Wide Open’, shows buildings that complement the land, whether by merging into it or contrasting against it. Houses sit parallel to vast plains, follow the movement of the ground or stretch perpendicular to flat outcroppings and clearings. The relationship between the ground and the structure goes both ways, such as in the gently curving Hus-1 (10) or the squat Todos Santos House (62).
‘Timberland’ is the name of the second section, which hides its structures amongst the trees, or even sometimes within them. the houses camouflage themselves with green roofs and inventive claddings, stretch tall into the treetops or nestle in living branches. The Juniper House (70) has a cloth wrapping printed with a photographic reproduction of the surrounding forest, the Cadyville Sauna (97) uses mirrors to blur the delineation of the interior and the Hemloft (100) bulges out from a central tree pillar like an almost cartoonish beehive.
‘Above It All’ shows houses that sit in height, not blending or hiding as in the first two sections but presenting a stoic acceptance of the often-extreme locations where they reside. Wood makes an especially strong showing here, with the mountainous regions being both familiar with and conducive to timber construction. The most beautiful inclusions in this section are often the most remote, such as the Entrée Alpine Panoramic Structure (150), a spiralling lookout on a Swiss mountaintop, or the Pinohuacho Observation Deck (180) overlooking a Chilean forested valley.
The final section is entitled ‘Down By The Waterline’ and looks at buildings that are located just there. Some are drawn from places where this intermediary space is cold and harsh, such as the several artist studios from an island in Newfoundland (188, 198 and others). Others come from bright and vibrant places where the meeting of water and land invites the occupants out into the world, such as in the Hut on Sleds (210), a moveable house near a New Zealand beach. These structures often sit a little lighter than the others contained in this book.
Rock the Shack is a fine architecture book, focusing on rural and extreme locations and the connections to nature that structures built there are forced to re-examine. With beautiful, although not quite as all-encompassing as might be hoped, is evocative and the writing covers the key points of the houses to explain their relevance in this book.