Tutored by Robert Mull, Peter Carl and Catrina Beevor
More about the proposed design plan
Against the arcane legal backdrop of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the Free Unit invite members of the public to imagine the social origins of the primitive hut. Our reinterpretation of this myth is concerned with the necessity of human exchange and labour in making the world around us, and how these transient activities are subsequently expressed in the more tangible material culture of building and settlement.
Akin to Soane’s practices importing antiquities from the worlds’ classical civilizations, the Free Unit has recently acquired an unusual set of timber artifacts during an expedition to Nikola Lenivets Park, Russia This family of objects form a fragment of a much larger work created by the artist Nikoloay Polissky.
Whatever single material is most readily available (and in Russia, that’s birch) is re-crafted as expediently as possible (in Russia, that’s with chainsaws) as a primitivism building block, and then another, and another, until there are enough blocks that a structure can be fashioned. The Free Unit Primitive Hut is to be not a building so much as a site compound – sections of Lincolns Inn Fields compartmented each year to create a theatre of construction, displaying the value of doing things (quite) slowly.
Project images
