Sheds - Softcover

Mansfield, Howard

4.2

5 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872331865 ISBN 13: 9780872331860

Publisher: Bauhan Publishing, 2016

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"A shed is the shortest line between need and shelter," writes Howard Mansfield. Drawing on material from his recent book Dwelling in Possibility, Mansfield explores the different types of sheds found around New England and beyond:covered bridges, barns, worksheds, "worship sheds" (meeting houses), extended farmhouses, bob houses for ice fishing. In lyrical style and supported by photographs by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey, Mansfield shows the connection between the design of these structures and their roles in our lives. "Sheds are like our lives--not the grandest building or the most graceful. Sheds are ordinary -- and in that they are exalted."

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From the Inside Flap:

Where I live, we really have only one kind of building, old and new, big andsmall: the shed. From woodsheds to barns, to houses, meetinghouses, and coveredbridges, they are all sheds. New England has never gotten much beyond the shedand we're the better for it. In fact, it's what tourists respond to, thoughthey certainly won't say, "We've come to see the sheds." But they love coveredbridges, and the way that the houses lining the common seem like the littlebrothers of the bigger meetinghouse, or the way the connected sheds and barnstrailing behind a house stand there like a third-grade class lined up for itsphoto.

Sheds are utilitarian. Sheds contain small things--wood and tools--and big:summers, winters, solitude, festivity. The smallest sheds can be liberating: abob house on a frozen lake, a summer cabin. They can shelter dreams.

Sheds are reticent. They stand back; they're demure, easily adaptable. Theylet life flow on through.

A shed is the shortest line between need and shelter. It's a trip from A toB. It's often built of found materials; it's built with a distilledpracticality.

The best sheds house this contradiction: they are built according to acceptedrules and thus they are free.

This is a small tour, near and far, of sheds.

About the Author:

Howard Mansfield is the author of nine books about preservation, architecture, and history, most recently Summer Over Autumn (Bauhan 2017). He has contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, Historic Preservation, and Yankee. He and his wife, writer Sy Montgomery, live in a 130-year-old house in Hancock, New Hampshire.

Joanna Eldredge Morrissey has been the staff photographer at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, for the last twenty-five years.

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