When not swamped working at a metropolitan outpost for global architecture firm 3DReid, Kevin Langan nurtures a hobby of outdoorsmanship. Well, kinda-sorta. His particular brand of roughing it: building huts from wild resources available wherever he is—which happens to often be in overgrown pockets of Glasgow, Scotland—in the shadow of hulking, modern architecture. His ultimate goal? To build 100 huts and stay one night in each, means he's all too often fighting off wind, rain, and "heaps of skipping flies and bugs," though always with aplomb and downright cheer. "I want to learn how to feel comfortable resting beside worms, biting insects, scurrying rodents, noisy birds or if I'm lucky—an inquisitive fox," he wrote when he started this project a year ago. And, 13 huts in, he's stuck to his guns; after spending a night on the beach scooping up flies, he writes, "This empty and windswept beach was actually full of life and I had the good fortune to sleep with most of them."
Above: hut No. 2, his temporary home on the on the south bank of River Clyde, located across from Zaha Hadid's Transport Museum. On the bank's patch of grass, Langan not only discovered the cut stone, fallen branches, and heavy moss he used to make his home, but also tens of thousands of beer cans and paraphernalia for hard drugs: "All this made me wonder, if anyone could show these unfortunates how to build a proper drug-den it was me!" More below.
Langan's huts are quite different from the many tricked-out, souped-up cubbies built in the wilderness, and his projects are certainly a million miles from the $2.5M "shack" stranded in the Hawaiian rainforests, but as pockets of survivalism in scrubby bits of metropolis, they're just as striking.
· 100 Wild Huts [Official Site]
· Six Garden Sanctuaries For the Modern-Day Thoreau [Curbed National]
· Buy a Shack in Paradise on Hawaii's Big Island for $2.5M