Verandahs as a kind of vivisection, not blurring the line between inside and out but redrawing it sharply through your body, your eyes and ears and finer hairs outside and the rest of your body in, roofed against the rain & sun. A 🧵 on the camps cabins lodges of Ontario… - ThreadSky

jamestaite.bsky.social • 53 days ago

Verandahs as a kind of vivisection, not blurring the line between inside and out but redrawing it sharply through your body, your eyes and ears and finer hairs outside and the rest of your body in, roofed against the rain & sun.

A 🧵 on the camps cabins lodges of Ontario…

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jamestaite.bsky.social•53 days ago

…of which porches were a defining feature. A key element in the 19thc recreational experience of nature, the frame between viewer and commodified view, dispensing the landscape in measured doses of restorative scenery for the maintenance of good health.

jamestaite.bsky.social•53 days ago

Scenes of early temporary camps for informal enjoyment of the bush show a scrim of trees at the shoreline standing against the light and space and promised liberty of the water, behind which tents are pitched.

jamestaite.bsky.social•53 days ago

In this setting, visual space was organized as a series of parallel edges: the near shore of the lake, the distant horizon of treetops. Views were perpendicular to these, through the uprights of tree-trunks.

jamestaite.bsky.social•53 days ago

That line of trees—often the young 2nd-growth birch and poplar of a largely logged-over landscape—was formalized in the thin posts of galleried verandahs at resorts of the late 19thc. Interior spaces were arranged behind these skirts: formal rooms for dining, socializing, sleeping.

jamestaite.bsky.social•53 days ago

One development from this proliferation of verandahs was that the building in a forest became architecturalized to the building-as-forest. Columns (often rough logs) support a Big Roof that can be identified as the tree canopy…

jamestaite.bsky.social•53 days ago

…But another path was the 20thc disaggregation of more complex interior space into atomized cabins, re-creating—despite their repetition & relative homogeneity—the freedom of temporary camps, mimicking their informality and rusticity, following the contours.

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