Lloyd,
Just looking at your blog and reminiscing. I’ll include my first house that was inspired by your first book. I built it in the woods outside Chapel Hill NC. I stretched burlap over the frames and sprayed it with watered-down cement. The area was many acres of owner-built alternative architecture. (The book “12 by 12” is about a little house that was on the next street over.) The funny thing about my little house is, years later I was traveling through the area and went by to see what it looked like. Astonishingly (to me), it had been turned into an upscale suburban sea of split-level homes but the one on my old lot had kept the little yurt and was using it for a pool house.
Since those days, I have built 6–8 houses; the most recent was in a community called City of the Sun in southern New Mexico primarily out of papercrete.
Thank you for all you have done to inspire countless dreamers.
–Bob Cook
Back in the ’60s, my architect hero was Bernard Maybeck who, along with architect Julia Morgan, designed a series of wonderful Bay Area buildings. One of Maybeck’s experiments was “Bubblestone,” making a wall by hanging burlap bags that had been “…dipped into a frothy mix of concrete and then hung, shingle-style, onto exterior walls.”
Reference for above quote: patch.com/california/berkeley/bp–architect-bernard-maybeck-and-his-experiments-witac2f59eef0
