I ran across this building as I was just about to cross a river on the road east-to-west across Vancouver Island to the “wild coast.” Nicely situated and designed. Hey, there’s way too little good architecture these days! It’s apparently an “administrative building” for the Tseshaht tribe. First Nations peoples have got their shit a lot more together than their more southern brothers. When you get to Washington there is an Indian casino complex that is well-designed (contrast this with the black vinyl air building casino near Clear Lake, Calif.)
About Lloyd Kahn
Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the
Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include
Shelter,
Shelter II (1978),
Home Work (2004),
Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008),
Tiny Homes (2012), and
Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
The Umista Cultural Center (http://www.umista.org/home/index.php)is well worth a look if you're ever in Alert Bay. "Umista" means return; it was built to house artifacts that were returned to the tribes from various museums (short version). The elementary school in Alert Bay is also an amazing building and the cirriculum includes a Kwakʼwala immersion program.