A tree house, a camp behind the sofa, a tent in the garden: through play, children love to escape from the real world and take refuge in a hidden, intimate place where they can invent a new universe. The lack of space and attributes is a treasure trove that feeds the imagination; absence becomes inspiration. This child and the secret, hidden room that he invents in his dreams are nestled deep within each of us.

‘Once we have overcome the terrors of the corridor, we too have all loved to dream in the back room,’ writes French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. ‘It is because a dream house lives within us, because we were a dark corner of our childhood home, a more secret room. (…) Every dreamer needs to return to his cell.’[1] Bachelard thus refers the dreamer back to the cell, a place of sober isolation where the imagination can run free.

The exhibition Inner Travels by Belgian artist Rinus Van de Velde, which recently ended at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, offered something similar by showing how the artist represents himself in exotic landscapes, underwater, in space, while admitting that he leaves his studio as little as possible. Rinus Van de Velde illustrates like no other the spatial paradox of the closed cell as a metaphor for freedom, where architecture provides an escape to a place where one can think and work better. In a world where distraction has become an addiction and concentration an economic model, the emancipatory power that emanates from a room of one’s own where one can shut oneself away, a place where one can function at one’s own pace, ‘a place to idle’ as Virginia Woolf wrote, where one can be totally idle or, on the contrary, totally productive, is stronger today than ever before.

‘The quest for a space where one can escape mentally and physically is very much a topical issue,’ writes Bart Tritsmans in an article in which he analyses four ‘refuges’. From an airy room in a garden to a concrete pool house, from the simplicity of a log cabin to the refinement of a study lounge, in each case, through seemingly minor additions, the architects have sought a way to respond to an eminently human desire: the quest for essence.more

But what happens when architects embark on this quest for themselves? Véronique Patteeuw examined four refuges created by architects and concluded that, here too, letting go was the common thread. If creating can be translated into endless testing of infinite possibilities, in the cabin, greenhouse or holiday home she describes, the minimal surface area gives rise to a project requirement of maximum simplicity. Experience comes naturally.

It is impossible not to notice that each of these places of refuge is ostensibly connected to the outside space, the garden, nature. Is it because nature helps us to embrace slowness? Does living in the midst of nature and with nature allow us to escape? Wim Cuyvers brings us out of our reverie with a clear and concise answer: No. ‘One of the few ways not to be a tourist in a landscape,’ he writes, ‘is to work there.’ But isn’t that precisely what we wanted to escape?

[1] Gaston Bachelard, La Terre et les Rêveries du repos (1948). Paris, Corti, 1984, pp. 102–103.