Antes de que llegara el invierno construí una chimenea y recubrí los costados de mi casa, ya estanca, con tablillas verdes desiguales obtenidas de árboles recién cortados y cuyos cantos me vi obligado a enderezar a cepillo. Continue reading Henry David Thoreau
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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s complete writings, speeches, interviews and other texts in one volume – available from the end of June from DOM publishers. Continue reading Mies
Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house, which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged to straighten with a plane. Continue reading Henry David Thoreau
Aquí se construían casas con los materiales que la propia naturaleza suministraba para una raza más ruda y resistente que la actual, que vivía gran parte de su tiempo al aire libre. Gookin, delegado de asuntos indios en la Colonia de Massachusetts, afirmó en 1674: “Sus mejores casas están cubiertas y elaboradas con gran cuidado, de manera cálida y acogedora, con corteza extraída de los árboles en aquellas estaciones en que la savia fluye con fuerza, corteza a la que dan consistencia con la presión de pesados troncos… Las casas más pobres aparecen revestidas con unas esteras confeccionadas con ciertos juncos, y resultan tan compactas y cálidas como las anteriores, aunque no tan buenas… Las he visto de hasta veinte y treinta o más metros de largo por diez de ancho… Me he alojado en ellas a menudo y las he encontrado tan acogedoras como las mejores casas inglesas”. Añade que, generalmente, estaban cubiertas con alfombras finamente trabajadas y bordadas, y disponían de todo tipo de ajuar. Los indios habían alcanzado tal progreso que eran capaces de regular el viento que entraba por el respiradero del techo con una estera suspendida y accionada mediante cuerdas. Una vivienda así podía ser levantada en un día, o como máximo en dos, y se desarmaba y volvía a armar cuando fuese necesario en apenas unas pocas horas; y cada familia poseía una, o por lo menos una parte. Continue reading Henry David Thoreau
A comfortable house for a rude and hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was once made here almost entirely of such materials as Nature furnished ready to their hands. Gookin, who was superintendent of the Indians subject to the Massachusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, “The best of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up, and made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they are green…. The meaner sort are covered with mats which they make of a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but not so good as the former…. Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred feet long and thirty feet broad…. I have often lodged in their wigwams, and found them as warm as the best English houses.” He adds that they were commonly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought embroidered mats, and were furnished with various utensils. The Indians had advanced so far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat suspended over the hole in the roof and moved by a string. Such a lodge was in the first instance constructed in a day or two at most, and taken down and put up in a few hours; and every family owned one, or its apartment in one. Continue reading Henry David Thoreau
