Hello, Lloyd.
I’ve just finished reading your lovely new book Rolling Homes and I thought I would send you some photos of our little bus from here in Richmond / El Cerrito.
I bought the carcass (see blue bus photo) of this 1972 Mercedes 306d bus from a young fellow who was riding his bicycle across the country. The bus was in a storage yard in Vallejo where it had been sitting for decades. The wheels were frozen in place as was the engine but the $500 price tag was an encouragement.
I was originally building a Moto Guzzi motorcycle to ride when I had the epiphany that building a rolling cabin and clubhouse would be more fun and would invite new friendships. Several years of effort but not too many dollars later this bus was the result. Its name is Hanuman after the monkey god … which is also a play on words because these little diesel busses are re-badged Hanomags.
It has a 4-cylinder OM615 diesel engine that purrs nicely and front-wheel drive. It gets 20 mpg. We have taken it to many festivals such as Earthdance, Raindance, Burning Man, and on kayaking/fishing trips to Mendocino, etc.
The bus turns 50 this year.… I plan to continue to drive it to all of the wonderful places that we enjoy here in California.… I am sixth-generation Californian with many wonderful photo albums full of Santa Cruz area historic photos passed along from my grandmother along with so many written stories and memories of our history here so far.
Read More …
One where you can spend a lot of time. All books face out…
256654
Sunday morning I wanted to give Lukas a break, so set off on foot in search of coffee and adventure.
Wasn’t finding a cool coffee shop, when a guy walked up and said “Lloyd!” … in a city of 3½ million people.
Bernd Lützelberger was a carpenter, a fan of our books, and we went to very cool espresso bar and hung out for a while.
Then off on my own, It was a quiet Sunday morning, and the good city vibes were extraordinary.
There is somehow a feeling of freedom in Berlin. Go figure.
Lukas came along with his bike and 4-year-old high-energy daughter Luna and we walked along waterways and in parks; I totaled seven miles that day.
Brought to mind JFK’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” of 1963 in what was then West Berlin.
256748
256736
I’m — pardon the expression — blown away by this city of 3½ million people, with its distinctly good vibes, say like Ojai, Calif., where you feel it as soon as you come into town. But here it’s on a huge scale, it’s pretty flat, trees in all streets, dozens of lakes with clear water that people swim in, multi-ethnic in food and everything else, somehow a feeling of creative freedom…
256697
Last Saturday, Lukas, his fpur-year-old daughter Luna, and I walked over to the Berlin Templehof airport, which closed 14 years ago. The landing strip is intact and used by rollerbladers, skateboarders, cyclists, and runners. Lukas does a voiceover with the video here.
The Nazis did an enormous construction in the mid-1930s. The main building was once one of the largest buildings in the world.
On the perimeter are a series of gardens, shown here. Things look a bit bedraggled, since the growing season is over, but what a great idea: people growing their own vegetables in the middle of the city.
256600
The exhibit, which was originally at the Architettura Biennale in Venice last year, is moving to Berlin and opening at the German Architecture Center this Friday, October 28.
Our books, Domebook One, Domebook 2, and Shelter are also on display in a large glass case. These models are based on drawings from those books.
Our exhibit was one of the first things you saw when entering the Arsenale di Venezia, the huge ship building complex in Venice (which was the largest industrial complex in Europe before the Industrial Revolution), now converted to exhibition space. Over 300,000 people visited the exhibition. When I was there with Lukas, there were crowds of people checking out our books and the models.
I’m flying to Berlin this Wednesday and will be doing a discussion with architect Leopold Banchini and curator Lukas Feireiss on hand-made housing and alternatives to traditional methods of building and living together. (And exploring Berlin — my first visit there.)
The title of the exhibit, There Are Walls That Want to Prowl is a line from the poem “Let’s Voyage Into the New American House” by Richard Brautigan, which was reprinted in Shelter.
More info at www.daz.de.
256592
From Lukas Feireiss in Berlin:
Friday evening October 28, we are opening our exhibition There Are Walls That Want to Prowl at the German Architecture Center (DAZ). Come, celebrate and discuss with us.
The exhibit was originally shown at the Biennalle Archittetura in Venice in 2021 and is an installation that combines building models from Lloyd Kahn’s books with architectural models by Leopold Banchini, interview footage, and photographs of Kahn’s home in California by Dylan Perrenoud. The exhibit was inspired by Kahn’s iconic books Domebook One, Domebook 2, and Shelter.
These three compendia of self-build architecture tell stories of alternative dwellings from nomadic structures in the Iron Age to contemporary mobile homes, consistently extolling ecological and self-reliant ways of living that liberate themselves from capital and production methods marked by alienation.
I’m pretty excited, taking off for a week in Berlin on Wednesday.
