This photo shows the structure of St. Mary of the Angels Catholic Church in Wellington, New Zealand. The church is around 100 years old and is an early attempt at building in a Gothic style with concrete. The stained glass windows were imported by ship from Munich, Germany from a factory later destroyed in World War Two.
Attic in Kelmscott Manor (near Oxford, UK), home of William Morris, founder of The Arts and Crafts Movement in England. Photo by Frederic H. Evans.
From the chapter of my forthcoming book Live From California: Breaking Free in the ’60s titled “Studying the Art of Building,” which details my trip to England to study real building after giving up on domes.
Kyle Thiermann interviewed me a month or so ago about geodesic domes. Kyle and I met each other through our mutual good friend Chris Ryan. (Both Kyle and Chris write on Substack, which I intend to do when I finish the book I’m working on now, Live from California.
I drive my old RV down Kahn’s dirt road and park outside his house. He purchased the lot in 1971 for six grand. He built his home with materials from a salvaged lumber from torn down Navy barracks at Treasure Island. Abalone shells decorate his yard and shimmer in the gray winter light. He greets me with a matter of fact “Hello,” then offers a calloused paw. Kahn has a white mustache, long white hair, and knife holstered at his hip. He looks a bit like an outdoorsy version of Albert Einstein. When I comment on the knife he leads into his toolshed, showing me how I can fashion a blade myself.
‘Do you want a skateboard?’ He offers, pointing to three that lay on the corner…
LOGAN COUNTY, Okla. — A curiosity rises amid the wheat fields along rural Highway 33, which cuts through the town of Guthrie.
It’s an immense, circular building — about 15,000 square feet inside — with a domed roof topped by an ornate cupola and a copper eagle. Standing at 72 feet, it is visible for miles on the flat Oklahoma expanse.
Jay Branson is building it in his backyard. He calls it his round barn, but it’s more of a prairie cathedral.
He has been working on it for seven years. As he builds, strangers come. They pull off the highway, haul up his long driveway and stare.
Some, overcome by the beauty, have wept upon seeing the inside of the dome, with its ascending rings of interlocking diamonds and octagons that Jay cut by hand from poplar wood.
At the top is an oculus, a round opening in the roof, like in the Pantheon in Rome. When sunlight streams in, the effect is downright heavenly.
LA Times
BY HAILEY BRANSON-POTTS | STAFF WRITER
MARCH 9, 2023
A 1,400-square-foot modular cottage from Impresa Building Systems was part of an outdoor display of modestly sized homes. Credit…Mikayla Whitmore for The New York Times
So for the first installment of a new column called “Living Small” — exploring the choices some people are making to live as simply, sustainably or compactly as possible, for ethical or aesthetic reasons, or both — we visited the association’s annual trade fair, the International Builders’ Show, to see how builders, manufacturers and architects are responding to this struggle.…
And who doesn’t love a little house? Visitors swarmed an outdoor area of the show where several factory-built examples had been erected. The most eye-catching was Casita, a 375-square-foot house that could be hauled to its site by a Tesla and unfolded like a flat-packed box. Manufactured by Boxabl, a Nevada-based company, Casita comes with plumbing, electricity and appliances, and costs $60,000. According to David Thompson, the company’s social media manager, 160,000 names are on the waiting list, and Elon Musk uses one as a guesthouse at his ranch in Boca Chica, Texas.
Next to Casita was a Boxabl sibling created from two vertically stacked modules joined by a spiral staircase. The cost-cutting finishes of the houses lent a disposable feeling, like Ikea furniture on an enormous scale, but it was hard to argue with the price and speed of assembly. (Unfolding a module takes about an hour, Mr. Thompson said.)…
Lloyd Kahn (born 1935) is arguably the most influential pioneer of the DIY building movement that emerged in the counterculture of the 1960s. Besides being trained as a carpenter and having built many homes by hand, he also has a special talent for presenting information in an easy-to-understand form, a skill he puts to use as editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications, where he releases books on building and fitness.
His first contact with the craft of publishing was in 1968 when he became a key contributor to the creation of the Whole Earth Catalog, which led him to publish two books on dome building and then, in 1973, the book Shelter (which went on to sell over 300.000 copies).
The name Shelter is significant here, as it describes the essence of why we build. When we speak of architecture we think of monumental structures or at least buildings for an elite, and not of the homes built to meet our most human needs. This is what I find so empowering about Kahn’s emphasis on building traditions outside the architectural canon: The message that you can still create your own home, without being rich or a professional. Much of what is presented to us today under the label #cabinporn has little to do with this utopian spirit that encourages a forgotten self-efficacy beyond what money can buy.
