“I want to go away soon and live by the lake, where I shall hear only the wind whispering in the branches. If I succeed in leaving myself behind, I shall consider myself content. My friends ask me what I will do when I get there. Is not watching the passing of the seasons a sufficient occupation?” So wrote Henry D. Thoreau (1817-1862) in his diary, before going off to live the life of a hermit on the shores of Lake Walden (Concord, Massachusetts). He later recounted the experience in his book Walden, or Life in the Woods. On the lakeside he built a log cabin, in which he lived for two years and two months.
“I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-foot posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trapdoors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite.” (Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, p. 53, Boston and New York Houghton Mifflin and Company, The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1906). The exact perimeter of the hut, identified only in 1945, is marked out today by a stone enclosure. Nils Holger Moormann has created a modern version of that cabin and, in homage to Thoreau and his book, has called it Walden.
The designer defines it as a garden-project, because Walden is a wooden hut in which garden tools and barbecue equipment can be kept. Walden is, however, something more: a dwelling module immersed in nature. Like a three-dimensional square, Walden accommodates objects and actions. It has special spaces for keeping nests for little birds, and others for rakes and forks, hosepipes and watering cans, pieces of wood… while in the central niche, open on both sides, the occupant can sit as in a cabin. A ladder leads to the upper level, where the occupant can lie down on a mattress and gaze at the stars through the Plexiglas roof, or stretch out beyond the sliding panels and contemplate the panorama. Made by a company specialising in wooden homes, Walden is into its first edition, but the future is open to further developments. The dimensions of the module (650 x 110 x 386 H cm) are calculated to allow the hut to be transported entirely by truck and in one piece.
Having always been fascinated by equipped one-room dwellings, a theme on which much of the furniture produced by his company is also focused, Nils Holger Moormann seems to have found in the Walden project a happy completeness. While living in the woods, Thoreau was arrested for tax evasion, which he had regarded as an individual protest against a slave-owning country engaged in an imperialistic war against Mexico. From that experience came the essay Civil Disobedience, a classic of libertarian thinking. Immersion in nature can have unexpected consequences.
