I’ve admired this little floating building for years, on a local bay.
This design could be adapted to living quarters. Barbecue, beer and tables out on deck. Winch to haul boat out of water. No rent.
Brilliant design often happens in unexpected places. I find a lot of it with farm buildings.
Architecture without architects.
Treehouses in Japan built by Yuichi Takeuchi. Yuichi visited us here in 2015. He’s an artist, carpenter and treehouse builder. He said he’d been heavily inspired by our book Shelter. He was making a movie called Simplife and interviewed me.
Today I was working on a camper van he built for skiing in Japan for our forthcoming book Rolling Homes, and I came across his treehouses, which can be found at www.treeheads.com.
Three side-by-side houses in SFO’s Sunset district last week.
One person commented that he had lived in one of these and that it had a 5′ by 5′ outdoor patio in the center of the house. Come to think if it, I remember such an inner patio in my friend Rod Lundquist’s mother’s house out in the avenues, it was like a light well with windows looking into it on all 4 sides. A pretty nice feature for houses that are built wall-to-wall.
The title popped into my mind and I just looked it up, nothing to do with houses, but a pretty nice opening stanza in this poem by Eugene Field, 1850-1895:
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe,
Sailed into a river of crystal light
Into a sea of dew.
“Where are you going, and what do you wish?”
The old moon asked the three.
“We have come to fish for the herring fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we,”
Said Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
Michael McDonough
Rising Earth Natural Building
Troy, NY
www.risingearthbuilding.com
Hi, Lloyd!
Thanks for the books and blog! Such an inspiration over the years. I wanted to share with you this cordwood masonry arch I built in the spring of 2017. It’s at the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science in Durham, functioning as the entrance to a woodland playground area. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I thought you might appreciate it.
I’ve been fortunate to work on a few really cool projects at the museum over the years, including this arch and a series of interconnected treehouses, hideaway woods. The arch is about 24′ long by 10′ high.
The arch is built on a stone foundation. The cordwood is a mixture of southern pines and eastern red cedar. I used a lime and sand mortar with a smidge of Portland and pigment. The arch itself was no doubt the trickiest part. I did some math and made a full-scale drawing on a huge piece of cardboard to confirm that the angle of the 6×6 timbers was correct in relation to the span. It’s amazing how much the slightest change in angle of the arc components changes the span. One other thing, you can’t tell in the photo, but the arch tapers quite a bit as it rises. This keeps the center of gravity lower, making the structure more stable laterally. I consulted with friend and master stone mason Thea Alvin, about making sure the arch would be structurally sound. The taper was her suggestion.
It was my first cordwood project. Before taking it on, I’ll admit I had mixed feelings about the aesthetics and soundness of cordwood construction. But I ended up really enjoying the process, and found that with the right approach, it can look outstanding.
Thanks for sharing, Lloyd!
Truly,
Michael
Michael McDonough
Rising Earth Natural Building
Troy, NY
www.risingearthbuilding.com
The works of our good friend Yogan have appeared in our last three building books. Right now I’m working on the story of his latest mobile home for our book Rolling Homes, and I ran across this photo of his present home in the woods.
This guy is prolific! See previous posts on his work, including his visit to California a few years back: www.lloydkahn.com/?s=yogan
His blog: yogan.over-blog.com
I really like the gambrel roof, where you take the gable shape, and push it up to get more headroom in the 2nd story. Big, spacious dormer nice for 2nd story.
Though it looks like it’s not being used (and there’s krappy shed attached on the left side), they’ve put a new roof on it.
There’s a lot to learn about building framing from farm buildings. Like the gussets here; attach them with construction screws and you’ve got simple, cheap connectors.
Shot on a trip in 2017, hanging out with Godfrey Stephens and Bruno Atkey…
I like a lot of things about this design, like the way the shingles flair out over the lower windows.
Too bad more people having homes built don’t just go with the thousands of well-worked-out designs like this, rather than hiring an architect, who will usually be trying to make a “statement.”
There are lots of of home-sweet-homes designs out there, worked out over centuries.
The Nenet reindeer herders need to move their tent every few days throughout most of the year. Every time they migrate they must pack the whole tent away, drag it across the tundra on sledges, and erect it again in a fresh place, sometimes in temperatures of minus thirty degrees. Survival depends on working together as a team.
After staying in the wooded taiga for two months they start to migrate north following the ancient paths of migrating reindeer (caribou). In four months they will travel up to 1200km and must pack and move every three to five days to keep up with their herd. They must reach their summer quarters before the snows melt and flood great rivers with icy waters too cold and deep for the calves, born along the way, to cross.…
