We will be at the Maker Faire in San Mateo this weekend selling books at a discounted price. Come on by and check out the booth.
Maker Faire Info: www.makerfaire.com/…
Photo by Lloyd Kahn
I have been looking forward to this for a while and it was not a disappointment! Lloyd Kahn is in the back of many self-builders’ cerebral toolboxes for his seminal works as Editor-in-Chief of Shelter Publications, California. His 1973 book Shelter is an incredibly detailed catalogue of building techniques through the ages, illustrated with the personal stories and evocative photos of small houses and cabins collected on his travels throughout the USA and Canada as well as Ireland and the UK…
Stone Bothy (Hut), The Small Isles, Scotland. Photo by Lloyd Kahn
Photo by Lloyd Kahn
This is a shack that I built on a remote beach about 5 years ago. (It’s such a long hike that I’ve never seen anyone at this spot.) I used hammer and nails. I kept a tarp stashed behind some bushes on the bank that I’d stretch over the top. Cook a pigeon or chicken on a fire, foil-wrapped potato and onions in coals. Sit around dying embers and watch stars. Flask of brandy. Sleep with waves hitting beach 50 feet away.
It blew down last year, and I’ll probably rebuild it later this year.
Driftwood shelter built with creative lashing; included in the recent Driftwood Shelters exhibition. Photo by Lloyd Kahn
Driftwood beach installation, a part of a collection of photos from the recent Driftwood Shelters exhibition Photo by Lloyd Kahn
Hi, Lloyd,
I thought you might be interested in a photo story I created from a visit to an amazing off-grid community in southwest UK called Tinkers Bubble. It’s the most inspiring example of low-impact living I’ve seen here (and I’ve visited a lot!). Hope you enjoy.
Best wishes,
–The Bimbler
In August of 2014, eight months after I had graduated with my B.A. in Cultural Anthropology, I traveled from California to Northwest Washington to begin my first build of many. For five weeks I worked alongside natural builder Sunray Kelley as we built a two-story studio-sized cedar treehouse with nothing but our bare hands, a drill, and a chainsaw…
I’m doing my first ever photo exhibit, opening this Saturday at the Bolinas Museum. It’s part of a 2-month-long exhibit on the subject of makeshift architecture, and features artists Jay Nelson, Whiting Tennis, and Eirik Johnson, along with my photos of driftwood beach shacks along the northern California coast.
Rick Gordon has processed and printed 24 14″×18″ prints and printed them here on our new Epson Stylus Pro 4900 inkjet printer. They look pretty darn good! The ingenuity of anonymous beachcomber artists.
The opening is this Saturday, April 2nd. At 2 PM, I’ll talk a bit about my background and our 46 years of publishing books on building and fitness; at 3 PM, there’s a reception.
Bolinas Museum
48 Wharf Road
Bolinas, California 94924
www.bolinasmuseum.org
There is a festival of architecture in Scotland now, sponsored by the Fife Contemporary Arts Center. It’s called “Shelters,” and features an entire room exhibiting our work, with photo and page blowups, and our building books on tables (above). It’s open now at the Kircaldy Galleries (Kircaldy is about 12 miles north of Edinburgh, on the east coast of Scotland) and runs through June 5, 2016.
I’ll be doing a slide show presentation on May 10th, at Kircaldy Galleries, titled “50 Years of Natural Building,” chronicling our building books from Shelter in 1973 up to the present.
John’s house on Lesquiti Island, BC, Canada. Photo by Yogan, Summer, 2015
Lobelia is the name of our 864-square-foot two-bedroom straw bale home. Named after a native wildflower, Lobelia was built with many reclaimed materials, including all framing lumber, most doors and windows, and even the kitchen cabinet.
The straw bale exterior walls are protected by earthen plaster inside and out. Outside, the hip roof and wood shingle skirt, made from pallet wood scraps, along with a coat or two of raw linseed oil, help protect the exterior plaster from the elements.
–Alyssa Martin and Tony (AKA Papa Bear) Barrett
This is Sneak Preview #14 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in spring, 2017.
The Building of the Cabin took 41 days. This included preparing the site for a foundation, building the timber framework, cordwooding the walls, and insulating and preparing the roof for earth, but did not include plumbing or electricity. While we built the cabin, we lived in a tent with our sons, then aged seven and five. Our days of building started at dawn and usually didn’t finish until 10 or 11 at night. We had no power or water on site; not only did this impact our building methods (everything mixed by hand, water brought to the site in drums), it also meant cold turkey from electricity for the kids.
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