Table Cabin

This project was named an Award winner in the 69th Annual Progressive Architecture Awards, and was featured in the March 2022 issue of ARCHITECT.

“With its recycled materials, inset in the earth, materiality, and the cleanness of the volume and form, I thought this was an amazing project.” — Juror Patricia Saldaña Natke, FAIA

Combining the functional stringency of Bauhaus-era Modernism, the conceptual daring of 1970s-style “paper architecture,” and modern ecological sensibilities, Table Cabin revitalizes the single-family house as a vehicle for avant-garde design. Intended as a shared country home for two Denver-based families, the design from the Colorado office of Kevin Hirth Co. defies almost every convention of the typology: no cooling or heating, save for a pair of wood-fired stoves; no plumbing, just a cistern-fed outhouse; no kitchen; not even a bedroom, just an improbable-looking series of indoor hammocks strung above the first story. The formal solution likewise confounds expectations with a stepped, almost loaf-like volume, composed of six mechanically milled timber layers stacked one atop the other and wrapped in rough, weatherproof tar paper. Entered via any one of seven narrow doors, the house unfolds as a sequence of nearly identical non-rooms, separated only by a narrowing in the felt-clad walls and distinguished by nothing except a dining table in one, a lounge chair in the next. With almost no carbon footprint to speak of, Hirth’s design puts Existenzminimum in the service of sustainability, then pushes both toward an abstraction that seems, in the words of Charles Gwathmey, “beyond accommodation.”

PROJECT CREDITS
Project: Table Cabin, Leadville, Colo.
Client/Owner: Kara Arany, Tom Arany, Jen Sanders, and Tristan Sanders
Designer: Kevin Hirth Co., Denver. Kevin Hirth, Director; Project Team: Ramiro Castillo, Schawn Li, Chauncey Queen-Booker, Illiana Ramirez, Rocco Sant, Emanuil Sklianin, Mo Zaina
Structural Engineer: Studio NYL
Architect of Record: Vessel Office of Architecture
Size: 660 square feet
Cost: Withheld