Reader Cabin

Art installation 2017 | A small cabin commissioned by Empik for the Apostrof International Literary Festival in Warsaw | Designed and built in a design-and-build teamwork with Antoni Ambroziewicz | Cool photography by Jan Dybowski | Read about it here | Scroll down for making-of pictures

Everybody loves a night pop-in into the workshop!

We received the reader cabin commission from Apostrof Literature Festival in the spring of 2017. The intention was to create an intimate space for reading books. Such a brief naturally brings to mind an allotment cabin – a familiar Warsaw structure. I wanted to make it a very special allotment cabin. Maybe this is exactly what every allotment tenant thinks: how to make my cabin look different than thousands of other cabins? Anyway I decided the hut should be wooden, with a pleasant woody smell inside. It also should have a plant inside. Most cabins are rectangular in plan but ours came out completely square. We purposefully gave it a tall pointed roof to make the hut’s proportions a little odd, intriguing, off-standard. The hut is entered through a small, narrow door. You have to climb one step, crouch a little – in other words make a little effort to go in. Once inside you find books, leisure seats and a lovely view of the river. We live in a world of very regulated, safe openings but in such installation as this one we can transport you to the childhood memories or dreams of walking through small doors to enter a secret room. We chose bloody red stain for the cabin exterior, revealing the plywood veins and knots. The inspiration came from this year’s Apostrof festival poster by Radek Szlaga featuring an image of large red human heart. It so happens that similar sanguine red colour is typical of Scandinavian timber architecture. It seemed like the proper choice for cozy little cabins.