One of the benefits of being a grownup is that you can take kid stuff to levels you’d never get away with as a kid. A couple of days ago, Sophia asked for help building a fort in her room. Three blankets, four clips, and the top to a plastic bin later and I’m the best dad ever (or at least until the fort comes down). It’s two stories, has three rooms, and has already hosted a sleepover.

There are two kinds of forts in the world: inside blanket-based and outdoor environmental. One is about soft comfort, denning, and mood lighting, the other is about carving a base out of the wilds. When I was a

kid, my go-to inside fort was built from the living room couch and its pillows—I’d make a kind of tunnel shelter, no blanket required. Better, though, was my outside fort: My dad built it from an old shipping box. It was four feet by four feet, had a roof, was mounted 25 feet up this giant tree at our cabin in central Pennsylvania, and was accessed by climbing the tree or a rope through a trap door in the bottom.

Despite my perspective, the lines between indoor and outdoor forts aren’t so clear, as evidenced in a recent fort-building contest held by booooooom.com and weloveyouso, the production company behind Where the Wild Things Are. Forts are personal expressions of delineation, of protection and sanctuary, and they come in endless varieties. Books, blankets, sticks, candles, Christmas lights, and string—there’s all manner of construction and materials, of concept and form.

Booooooom launched the contest with some examples from a photo series by Kelly Burgess, who asked people to build forts and fill them with things they love. That’s a different undertaking altogether—there’s the fort and there’s the stuff in it. Burgess was interested in the people and how they defined themselves and though she was vague in the instructions “something you love”, she saw patterns in the objects they brought with them. “I soon found myself bearing witness to the overwhelming need to own and display things,” she writes on her site. “This excessiveness made me start to question whether these structures and objects speak more about our actual personalities or about how we wish to present ourselves to the world.”

Well, yes—but those folks were asked to bring objects into their forts. A wonderful idea and really insightful, but I’m more curious about the forts themselves—not so much what they say about how we want to be perceived, but how we express our sense of comfort through found objects and the environment. Having just built one, the curious thing is that the structure of the fort—its outer expression—pales in comparison to the internal landscape that fills it. From the outside, Sophia’s fort is a couple of blankets stretched haphazardly across a nine-year-old’s very messy room. But from within, there’s the first and second floors, the reading room, the play room, the porch for kitties, and the sleeping chamber—it’s a palace.

As much as a fort exists in the material world, its animation, its whole reason for being comes from inside. Two sticks, after all, can make a fort, with the right amount of imagination. Something to think about as you look at the pictures.

Put another way, from a note attached to one of the Booooooom entries:

“We transferred half of my living room into a double story wonderland. We had the jazz blaring and the warm breeze flowing through our tiny window. we had lollies, an elephant tea pot, juice, lots of bubbles, blankets and pillows. We filled it with our favorite things, it was incredible. This photograph does not do it justice, it was simply the most cozy and happy place I’ve been for so long.”

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More forts! Click on picture, use arrow keys to navigate forward and back.

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Booooooom has eight pages of contest entries. To see more–and to see the winner–visit the site. LINK.

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All photos copyright their respective owners.

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Tagged as: environment