This is a pretty thorough recap of my background in building, domes, the ’60s, and the subsequent Shelter books.
https://medium.com/learning-for-life/making-shelter-simple-an-interview-with-lloyd-kahn-64059138e756
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:
Lloyd, I would very much like to get your take on 1] Buckminster Fuller 2] Paolo Soleri 3] Ken Kern. As well as SHELTER they were early influences and I would like to sort out there relevance, they have kind of been forgotten now, rightly so?
Quail:
1) Bucky was inspirational in 60s, but I came to feel his designs and ideas were sterile (Dome over Manhattan, "Design Scientists." machine-made housing, etc.) and he took credit for things he did not invent:
1. The Dymaxion car was a copy of the much earlier 1913 Alfa Romeo aerodynamic "Monovolume."
2. The geodesic dome was invented in Germany in 1922, patented by Fuller in 1955.
3. He took credit for Kenneth Snelson's work on tensegrity.
2) Soleri: I was an early fan ('60s), but not of Arcosanti. Megalomaniac architecture.
3) Ken Kern: wonderful man, I read and re-read The Owner Builder Home in the early'60s.
This link from the interview is also really insightful:
http://www.shelterpub.com/_shelter/smart_but_not_wise.html
Lloyd, I have to say that your perspective always emboldens my convictions. It's also just crazy sad that so little has changed in so many years. I have a lot rattling aorund my head right now, wish I could make sense of it.
Thanks for that, Ken Kern still resonates for me, kind of a romantic notion of independent living.