“Tree House… 27 feet high in seven old-growth firs.”
https://www.potkettleblack.com/natbild/sunray.html
I’ve always loved barns. Whenever I drive in the country, I seek them out. I shoot photos from the outside, and invariably, since they are seldom locked, from the inside. Many is the time I’ve stepped inside a barn and been stunned by the beauty. The architecture of necessity. My kind of cathedral.
For years I’ve been meaning to do a book on barns, and have quite a collection of barn books. (This isn’t all of them.)
I just discovered a drop-dead book of barn photos. I read it in bed last night and ended up putting about 20 markers in on pages with beautiful photos.
It’s Hand Raised: The Barns of Montana, by Chere Justo & Christine W.Brown, with photos by Tom Ferris. It’s the best barn book I’ve ever seen (and all these barns are in the state of Montana!). See: https://shltr.net/tomsbarns for lots of photos from the book.
Making Shelter Simple: An Interview with Lloyd Kahn By Avi Solomon at 1:07 pm Tuesday, May 15.
It’s a pretty long interview, along with an audio track. It’s nice when a journalist gets it right. Here’s the beginning:
Avi Solomon: What do you see in your childhood that pointed you onto the path that your life took?
Lloyd Kahn: When I was a kid I had a little workbench with holes in it, and the holes were square or round or triangular. And you had to pick the right little piece of wood block and hammer it in with a little wooden hammer. And so I’d hammer with it, put the round dowel into the round hole, and hammer it through. And then maybe the most formative thing was when I was twelve – I helped my dad build a house. It had a concrete slab floor, and concrete block walls. And my job was shoveling sand and gravel and cement into the concrete mixer for quite a while. We’d go up there and work on weekends. One day we got the walls all finished, and we were putting a roof on the carport, and I got to go up on the roof. They gave me a canvas carpenter’s belt, a hammer and nails, and I got to nail down the sheathing. And I still remember that, kneeling on the roof nailing, the smell of wood on a sunny day. And then I worked as a carpenter when I was in college, on the docks. I just always loved doing stuff with my hands.…”
Click here for the whole interview: https://boingboing.net/2012/05/15/making-shelter-simple-an-inte.html
“Arthur Millican Jr., a former Disney artisan, typically works at a much smaller scale building tiny houses for fairies and gnomes, but this super sized fairy house has been scaled up and is ready for play!”
https://bit.ly/J9zXNX
This is the working vehicle of builder Bryan Kufus of Vadnais Heights, MN. It’s a 2003 Ford F350 he bought used from Home Depot. The body is a customized unit, built by Alum-line in Iowa. There’s a heavy-duty sliding section in the back and multiple cabinets on each side, containing just about all the tools (+ caulks, glues, etc.) that any carpenter would want. Details will be in our next book on road vehicles and boats.
Mark is one of the original founders of the North House Folk School, and yesterday afternoon I hung out with him in his shop, wood fire burning in stove. A working shop is a great place to hang out. There were spiffy models of boats and canoes hanging all over. Mark seems to be able to design and build just about anything (including 26 birchbark canoes, mostly in North House classes).
I wanted to see photos of a number of mobile things he’s built. Since he doesn’t use a computer, I downloaded 381 photos from his camera and suddenly I have a passel of well-designed and well-crafted things for our next book, Wheels and Water: van, sailboat, shed, tent-in-snow, yurt, toboggan…
I’d been noticing these little carved figures and asked him where they came from. Well, he carved them. More to come from Mark…
Well, I was nervous. I was, ulp, the featured speaker of a 3-day symposium on sustainability and to tell the truth, I’m more comfortable with a lower profile. Plus this was a bunch of competent people. By the time the room filled up, there were 100 people, and I’d say that just about every one of them could build and/or grow and/or create wonderful objects with their very own hands.
Plus the the MacAir, as it is mysteriously wont to do, was not speaking to the Epson projector (in a language the Epson could understand). I was sweating it. Helpless with the complexities of the digital world. (Doing slide shows with a Carousel projector back in the day was way less risky. Slides in slots. I could see them, etc.)
We finally got rolling, with some tech advice from the crowd. “Hit option-command-escape.” Well OK.
It was the 12th slideshow I’ve done now, and people all over the country seem to be interested in tiny homes. I told them something that has occurred to me lately,that it’s not necessary for everyone to live in a tiny home. The message here is to go in the direction of smaller. Rather than larger.
I’m doing a talk at noon today on communication, how I get pics and info into regular books, e-books, newsletters, and blog posts. Methods, materials, techniques. Photography and interviews and email communication. Then back to Duluth and home sweet home Monday. What a great trip this has been!
Notes:
-This maybe take a while to load
-I don’t know where it is or who they are, but it sure is far out.
-Looks like they used a radio-controlled helicopter with camera (I’ll bet a Go-Pro) attached.
-This came from Jonaven Moore via Godfrey Stephens
This handcrafted home just knocked me off my feet. Two creative, competent, and wonderful artists created this house (and outbuildings) out of driftwood, beach and river stones, home-milled lumber, all with exquisite craftsmanship.
One of these years when we do another non-tiny (or non-small) book (like Home Work), this will be the star of the show.
The owners said they had resisted any photography thus far, but liked our books, so it was OK if I shot photos. It was like discovering a rainbow.
I’m going to think about this one for a while.
“Tree House… 27 feet high in seven old-growth firs.”
