Blueprint from Walden

Henry David Thoreau's Yankee mind ranged from poetry to lead pencils (he invented a better one). The editors of Britain's highbrow Architectural Review have now found a fresh distinction for him: give or take a few details, Thoreau did a startlingly good job of anticipating the modern house. With a layout of some recent U.S. designs, Architectural Review ran a snatch from Walden:

"I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in the golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, which shall still consist of only one room . . . ,a cavernous house . . . where some may live in the fireplace, some in the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose."

Home would be a place "where you can see all the treasures of the house at one view ... at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, storehouse and garret ... A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest. . . where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven-eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell and told to make yourself at home there--in solitary confinement."

But perhaps all this was not as modern as the Architectural Review thought. To U.S. Thoreau fans, it all sounded a good deal like the cabin on Walden Pond, enlarged in furniture and company.

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