https://www.vancouversun.com/travel/What+best+home+Tiny+very+tiny/10219367/story.html?__federated=1

I’m here in Vancouver. It’s a spectacularly beautiful city, especially today, bright after yesterday’s rain, the water sparkling, everyone out.

Doing an interview at 7 AM Monday on CBC’s “Early Edition” program, then a presentation Monday night at The Vancouver Public Library…details here.

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

Hey Lloyd:

Just thought your readers might like to know… we are giving away a copy of The Genius of Japanese Carpentry for free. It’s an excellent book… extremely awe-inspiring to see the images and drawings of some recent traditional temple renovation and construction in Japan. Mind-boggling timber framing and attention to detail. The title says it all. They don’t mess around.

www.theyearofmud.com/2014/08/05/genius-of-japanese-carpentry

– ziggy

Brian ‘Ziggy’ Liloia – Natural Building Workshops & more at The Year of Mud:  https://www.theyearofmud.com

Barns and Books

There are buildings that have—for lack of a better word—a sweetness to them. Like a small abandoned cottage in an English field I once found, slowly disintegrating back into the soil from which all its materials came. Inside, I could feel the lives that had been lived there. Or the buildings of master carpenter Lloyd House. It happens most frequently in barns, where practicality and experience create form with function. No architects needed, thank you.

The unique feature here is that the roof’s curve is achieved by building the rafters out of 1″ material. 1 x 12’s laminated together (I believe 4 of them) to achieve the simplest of laminated trusses. I shot photos here pretty extensively, and I’ll do a piece on it when I get time. The barn is 24′ wide, 32′ long, 26′ to the ridge. (Thanks to Mackenzie Strawn for measuring it; he also wrote: “I have a carpentry manual from the 1930’s with a short section on the Gothic arch barns, they suggest making the roof radius ¾ the width.”)

We are about to build a small shed and I’m going to try to figure out how to do a curved roof this way.

Another building I’ve always admired is Nepenthe, the cliffside restaurant in Big Sur. Rafters and beams are strong triangulated laminates of one-bys. No two-bys in the main roof structure. (It was designed by a Frank Lloyd Wright protégé, I’ve heard.)

I had a great crowd last night in my presentation at Powell’s, which is just the most super bookstore on the planet. An entire city block, 4-5 floors of books. I could spend days there. You wander around, looking at all the face-out books, and the hand-written staff picks, and realize the paucity of buying books at Amazon. If you love books, friends, hie thee to bookstore. You’ll find tons of books you’ve never heard of. Support bookstores!

It’s a warm sunny morning here in Portland, just a lovely, friendly city. I’m at a Stumptown cafe, getting ready to hit the road south, searching for barns on my way to Eugene.

A great crowd at Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino last night for my Tiny Homes on the Move slideshow. In addition to the 50 or so mobile homes I showed, we talked about farming, building methods and materials, the ’60s*, and building codes. I looked at the roomful of people — we were all on the same page — causing me to reflect on who are these people, who are “we?”

   Dwell magazine, bless its sterile heart, is the completely other side of the picture and, due to its popularity, I would guess our group is in the minority — kind of like the book lovers in Fahrenhei 451. I’ve been trying to define the characteristics of our group. We believe in doing things with our own hands…natural materials…craftsmanship…working kitchens…solar heated water…colorful interiors…Feng shui…gardens, chickens, foraging. One of these days I’ll write something about who we are. In the meantime, heh-heh, check out https://www.theshelterblog.com; this is the kind of stuff we like.

*I said to someone recently, “Well, the ’60s happened in the ’70s — no actually, the ’60s happened in the ’60s and the ’70s — and she said, “The ’60s are still happening.” In many cases, being rediscovered.