I ran across the book Building With Earth by Gernot Minke when I was in London last month. It’s just been published (Birkhäuser Publishers, Berlin) and is an informative, up-to-date handbook on earth architecture. I visited Minke some 20 years ago at his studio near Kassel, Germany, and saw a lot of his work with cob, strawbale, and living roofs — very advanced for the late ’80s. He’s kept at it, in addition to teaching at the University of Kassel, and this book is a culmination of all those years of work.
This photo, in the book, is of a building in a small town in Colombia by architect Octavio Mendoza Morales. More of Morales’ work can be seen at: https://www.casaterracota.com. When you get to the site, it’s in Spanish, so press: “Entrar,” then “Galeria,” then to see more photos, “siguiente.”
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:
