Richard Olsen’s HANDMADE HOUSES Journal

“Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of being a guest at Taliesin West, the Scottsdale, Arizona, campus of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. On one of those trips, I ventured out into the far reaches of Wright’s desert acreage to study the dwellings designed and built by the school’s students as part of their learning-by-doing education. Youthful creative energy, ideas, and confidence + small plot of land + trifling financial resources for materials + the ghost of Frank Lloyd Wright = ingenious solutions to small-space living?  Yes—mostly.

   Working within the safe zone of the campus, the students could laugh at common code restrictions, so pushing the envelope of design and construction was possible, if not a given.

   Architectural salvage stands out in the materials palette, and it’s frequently worth noting how much those rugged bits and pieces invigorate the students’ handling of the refined Wrightian design vocab and “desert concrete construction” system.…”

https://www.richardolsen.org/blog/

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:

Leave a Reply