Building (356)

Master Carpenter in Japan Builds on Wheels



Mr. Tagami follows a principle of organic architecture. He describes his tiny house designs as growing like seeds, each with it’s own life and character. Before constructing a home, he creates scale models to ensure that his concept works and that the home will be aesthetically appealing.

As a man who is conscious of our environmental footprint,  Mr. Tagami strives to use natural materials wherever possible which at the end of the home’s life will be able to return to the earth and not become a burden for future generations. Great care is taken in the sourcing of materials to ensure that the home is not only healthy for the earth, but also for those who will live in it…

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Hallig Home in Northern Germany

Hallig Habel during “land unter,” a local term describing the flooding of the Halligs during storms when just the houses stick out of the water. Thirty years ago, when this picture was taken, the house was inhabited by a farmer. His sheep and cattle spent their nights in the lower story. In extreme storms, when the lower story was flooded, the farmer would bring his animals upstairs. Photo by Hans Joachim Kürtz

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Timber Home on Canada's Sunshine Coast

Around eight years ago my brother and I bought some land on the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia. He planned on building a large shop and I planned on building a small house, at the same time there was some logging going on behind the place, so we bought some logs —
mostly second-growth Douglas fir…

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5 Questions with Lloyd Kahn

City Lights Bookstore welcomes Lloyd Kahn on Tuesday, April 11th. He’ll be discussing his new book, Small Homes: The Right Size, from Shelter Publications. Lloyd answered our 5 questions. More about him, and his answers, below.


The Event: Tuesday, April 11th at 7:00PM. 261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco, CA 94133.

About Small Homes: Are tiny homes too small for you? Do you want living space larger than 200–300 sq. ft. of floor area? Hot on the heels of his popular Tiny Home series of books, Lloyd Kahn revisits smallish structures and explores the possibilities of working within limited physical spaces and maximizing creativity in relation to one’s needs. His new book is profusely illustrated and he will be presenting a visual presentation that will include many images that never made it into the book.

Featuring: 120 homes in the 400–1200 sq. ft. range, owner-builder techniques, natural materials, a variety of construction methods, inspiration from owner-builders, a cornucopia of ideas, small homes in the country, towns, and cities, and over 1,000 photographs. Use your own hands to build your own home.

About Lloyd Kahn: Lloyd Kahn is the editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications, an independent California publisher. Shelter Publications specializes in books on building and architecture, as well as health and fitness.


City Lights: If you’ve been to City Lights before, what’s your memory of the visit? If you haven’t been here before, what are you expecting?

Lloyd Kahn: First time maybe 1962, I was an insurance broker and started to wander in North Beach during my lunch hour. Memory of wonderful place. I bought Howl.


CL: What’s the first book you read & what are you reading right now?

LK: I started out reading books on the sea by Howard Pease at 12 years of age or so. Right now reading A Man Called Ove by Frederik Bachman.


CL: Which 3 books would you never part with?

LK: Barns of the Abbey of Beaulieu at Its Granges of Great Coxwell and Beaulieu-St. Leonards by Water Horn and Earnest Born, Das Skizzenbuch des Francesco di Giorgio Martini, and Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels


CL: If your book had a soundtrack, what would it be?

LK: The album “Let It Bleed” by the Rolling Stones (which includes “Gimme Shelter”).


CL: If you opened a bookstore tomorrow, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

LK: Maybe some day I’ll open a bookstore and sell off the some 600 books I have on building and architecture. I could call it Learning to Build.


Join Lloyd and City Lights on Tuesday, April 11th at 7PM as we celebrate the release of his new book, Small Homes. Get the book direct from Lloyd’s Shelter Publications, at City Lights, or ask for it at your local independent bookseller.

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Tiny Texas Houses

This photo is the cover image on our book, Tiny Homes.

My Mascot, the first house I ever built: a 10′ × 16′ Rustic Texas Cabin, our most popular style. It was picked up in the air and dropped 15 feet over on the edge of a concrete slab in the tornado, one of the reasons we have stainless steel cables that run through the house peak and down for anchoring them now. We only broke one pane of glass in the loft when it was tossed around…

–Brad Kittel
Founder and Owner
Tiny Texas Houses

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Jeffrey's Straw Bale House

Hey there!

Well, it’s happened twice now. Just as you publish a book on a subject, I finish a project that might have sat nicely in your book!

First one was my tiny home dome, released just after your book Tiny Homes

Then coincidently I purchased and moved onto my 38 ft. narrowboat just as you released Tiny Homes on the Move

Now. I have just finished creating this 40m2 / 430 sq. ft. straw bale house with my new company, Hartwyn. The building is named Ty Twt — Welsh for “small home.”

It was an interesting project, where we offered the entire build as a training program. We took a group of mixed-skill interns through the entire building process in 12 weeks.

We used local straw, dug our site clay for plasters, and the timber was (mostly) all milled locally. It boasts a green roof, composting toilet, tadelakt shower (Moroccan lime plaster), and greywater system.

I have attached some pictures, and have high-res ones if you would like. But all of the information is on our site with a nifty little time-lapse of the whole process!

Hope this is of some interest!

–Jeffrey


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The House-Box

Our home, completely designed, restored and converted by ourselves, is a 7.5-ton 1979 Bedford TK. To the naked eye it looks like a traditional tweedy handmade home, but scratch the surface and there’s enough sustainable technology to enable us to reduce our combined outgoings from £800 (when we lived in our last “house”) to just £20 on LPG!

We have a comprehensive PV solar set-up, powering a 450-amp-hour bank of AGM batteries, on which we run just about anything we want…

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Godfrey Stephens' Junk-Rigged Snookwis

…An ancient Nitnat canoe (carved from one cedar tree), which Godfrey rebuilt in the ’70s. It’s sheathed in copper, with an underwater Nautilus window and a tiny stainless steel wood stove; there’s room for two. Tilikum (Godfrey’s daughter) is now the caretaker of the boat and keeps it in Port Townsend, Washington…

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Rob's French Army House Truck

… It’s a 1959 French Army Truck — a Simica Unic Marmon Bocquet (or SUMB). The shack is built with wood from local sawmills, reclaimed bits, corrugated steel, and insulated with sheep wool. Friends Jo House and Charlie Goodvibes helped with the building, which took about three weeks, I hadn’t built anything like this before, but now I feel ready to build anything…

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Tom's Cabin

It started as a “Tall Barn” prefab kit from Tuff Shed (which has a large selection of pre-fabbed little structures). It was about $4,000 for the structure, exterior walls, roof deck, floor, and floor framing, delivered on a truck. Studs are 2×4’s two feet on center. Exterior walls are ⅜″ particle board with a wood grain pattern. Tom insulated the inside walls and roof with R-11 fiberglass batting, then used ⅜″ CD plywood for sheathing…

Read More …

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Homestead of Recycled Materials in Quebec

…In the fall of 2008 we came across an opportunity to pick up pine trees that were locally cut. We adapted our plans to the amount of wood available.

We hired a local sawmill owner to cut the timbers for us. That winter we rented a shop and prebuilt a 24′×30′ timber frame of 9′×9′ pine. The joinery is mortise-and-tenon, sculpted with mallet and chisels…

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