Thorough;

Abstract

Henry David Thoreau writes in the first chapter of his book, Walden, that before he could begin work on his house by the pond, he first had to borrow an axe. "Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy pines, still in their youth, for timber."This passage, which marks the moment when Thoreau first turns to describing building his house, illustrates something surprising. Thoreau's famous experiment in self reliance began with another man's tools. As independent as Thoreau intended his enterprise to be, for Thoreau, borrowing is more rule than exception, appearing repeatedly and in varying ways throughout his account. He relies frequently on materials, knowledge, labor, etc. that are outside himself or his capacity to create. The nails he bought from a blacksmith. The boards were recycled from an old shanty. The land itself and the trees on it were loaned to him by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. Tools, natural resources, supply chains, help, etc. had to be bought, loaned, or scavenged in order for Thoreau to build and live, as he says, "by the labor of his hands alone."This thesis is interested in that shortfall, where Thoreau's ideals about how to build and live, which is represented in the Walden text, do not match the true constraints of building and living, which are represented in the architecture. Proposed here is a series of alternatives for Walden. Each carries with it as constraint and ideal of independence. Each exaggerates the effects of those constraints as a way to better uncover their inherent tensions. Together, the designs serve as a manual, playing out the implications in design of the limits that define them.