Last week Yogan and I spent an hour exploring the Fort Ross State Historic Park, a masterful re-creation of the Russian Fort built on the Northern California coast in 1812. The Russians brought down Native Alaskan hunters who speared sea otters from seal skin kayaks. Most of the hunters came from the Kodiak Islands and their kayaks, spears, and hunting techniques were extraordinary (more on this later).
If you are ever driving up the Northern California coast, I highly recommend going to this site.
Here is the chapel (star of the show), metal shop, and wood shop. Roofing on these buildings consisted of 2 layers of long planks, laid with the cracks in the top layer over the centers of the under layer.
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:
Last week Yogan and I spent an hour exploring the Fort Ross State Historic Park, a masterful re-creation of the Russian Fort built on the Northern California coast in 1812. The Russians brought down Native Alaskan hunters who speared sea otters from seal skin kayaks. Most of the hunters came from the Kodiak Islands and their kayaks, spears, and hunting techniques were extraordinary (more on this later).
Thank you..love the work which went into it, and the tool display.
Ft. Ross is a most interesting place to visit, the detailing in the timber joinery is worth seeing as is the array of artifacts on display. If memory serves, the original builders/occupants also raised veggies, etc. for the folks who remained in Sitka.
want to see the real deal of russian wood building? look here:
http://in.rbth.com/arts/travel/2015/09/02/the-wonder-of-karelias-wooden-churches_394057
maui,
Yes, there's a full page on the Transfiguration church at Kizhi in our 1973 book Shelter. "It is said that the basic structure was built with an axe, nothing more, by the master builder and architect Nester, and that upon completion '… the master became lost in thought, looked at his hand holding the axe, and unwilling to admit that this very same axe might perhaps create such beauty elsewhere, suddenly, with the great swing of his arm, hurled it into the lake.'”