A Modern Primitive Hut

Phau and Jones' intention with their primitive hut was to design architecture for the hunter/gatherer,    someone who would scavenge and then recycle materials, and find ways to heighten the use and role of machine in architecture. Shipping containers took up the base of the home, with the addition of then current day, mass produced materials such as I-beams, glass aluminium, ramps and billboards. We questioned as a group how this concept of Phau and Jones' primitive hut would translate into our current times, and how the technology, manufactured items and mass production that is evident today would replace the items used for their version of the primitive hut.

Jones and Phau's primitive hut had an industrial theme to the objects used. They were items of popular demand for their time period, and we wanted to see what these objects would be like for the 21st century. For this small personal assignment, we brainstormed ideas of objects and materials that are mass produced today. The list was very large since the technology of today has dramatically changed in the past few decades. Items like cellphones, game consoles, laptops and television screens are examples that resonate from today's society as mass produced everyday objects which weren't around before.

Using one of Jones and Phau's primitive huts as inspiration, I designed a modern day primitive hut out of laptops, cellphones, pop cans, plastic bins, public signage, fluorescent bulbs, gaming devices a plasma screen TV and a treadmill. This new hut has many physical characteristics that are similar to Phau and Jones' hut, such as an overhanging attachment on the back wall, which in their case was a billboard but developed into a TV screen, a roofing component, a ramp element in the front and a box-like form in the centre. 

Although the times have changed there are still themes from Jones and Phau's primitive hut that can relate to our current society, and we were able to demonstrate this with this design. 

Water colours done by Marisa Musing 

Panorama Shipping Containters

Here is a larger scale version of the morphology of the use of shipping containers for the Primitive Hut. This gives a better perspective of the influence that shipping containers had on their work and the final design.

The idea behind the primitive hut was to use existing materials that are massed produced, and incorporate them into the design for a home, whose final form would consist of completely scavenged and recycled materials, similar to the work of a hunter or gatherer. Jones and Phau took on this ideal and decided on the use of a shipping container as the basis for their primitive hut design. Shipping containers come in various sizes, but they worked with the standard 20 ft standard ISO shipping container, which Jones had and continued to use in later projects for PRO/con. From the shipping container base, the home dwells into more stacking and collecting of parts to create a collage-like effect, and a primitive look. 

Irony can be found through this design because of the lack of typical primal materials to build the home. The word primitive is more often thought of as being natural, wild-like, and something taken from the Earth, rather than manufactured goods. However the ironic juxtaposition found in Jones and Phau's primitive hut, with its inclusion of wood logs and branches in each of their designs, develops a new way to consider the ideals of a primitive hut.