“Hi Lloyd,
I read your blog regularly and love the mix of ideas. Don’t know if you’ve seen this but I found a site with simple plans for furniture and household items. Matthias Wandel grew up in Canada where his parents bought an old sawmill, and built and rented out tourist cabins. Matthias is also an artist and woodworker with new articles each week. He’s posted lots of pictures of his father’s woodworking projects, from unique door latches to cabins with all the furnishings. Naturally I thought of you.
Got up at 5 AM, took off for points north to visit my friend Louie. It’s a 2-1/2 hour drive that always takes me 4 hours because I dawdle, mostly stopping to shoot photos. Here are a couple of perfect little farm buildings.
This company offers 50 small cabin plans, available on a CD. I have no idea what the plans are like, but I like the rendering here, allowing a novice builder to visualize the construction. (This is what we did with 5 tiny home plans in Shelter in 1973.)
This website is loaded, and the CD sounds like a pretty good deal, but I haven’t seen it. I ordered the free download of a sample and if it’s any good, we’ll add these guys to our Tiny Homes List of links on our website.
https://smallcabinplansonline.com/shed-and-cabin-plans/
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…
Bruno and his brother smoked/barbecued the sockeye salmon with cherry wood on this portable rig. Cedar shakes screwed on to old chair frames; what a great idea.
Lloyd House was the featured builder in Builders of the Pacific Coast. His skill and ingenuity and joy in building were stunning, as shown in more than a dozen homes in the book.
Lloyd left his cliffside compound on the west coast of Vancouver Island a few years ago and converted a 1992 Econoline van into a 70 sq. ft. home and now lives on Hornby Island. There are photos of it by Michael McNamara in Tiny Homes.
I dropped in on him as soon as I got to Hornby and on a grey, drizzly afternoon, we got reacquainted. I love the company of Lloyd and my friend Louie, both a few years older than me; we grew up in a different world. Did I want dinner. Well yeah-uh. We had chard soup and a big salad with greens from Barbara’s thriving greenhouse.
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| The band of windows brings the outside in. It’s an exquisite space. 10′ × 7′ = 70 sq. ft. |
“Hi Lloyd,
I just came across these great old plans on Flickr and thought you might appreciate them:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/texasstatearchives/4503235300/in/set-72157623816833432
Read More …
Pictured: 1913 Alfa Romeo Castagna Aerodinamica
This Thursday is the opening of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit: “The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller.” They called a few months ago, wanting to interview me on my experiences with Bucky. I told them it would be a negative interview, to wit: 1. Fuller did not invent the geodesic dome; the first geodesic dome was built in Jena, Germany in 1922, designed by Dr. Walter Bauersfeld. Fuller secured a patent in 1954, and always claimed he was the inventor. (Full story on pp. 180-81 of Shelter.)
2. Nor did Fuller invent the tensegrity sphere or the tensegrity mast, both of which he claimed credit for. They were invented by a student of his at Black Mountain College, artist Kenneth Snelson.
3. His Dymaxion car was obviously based on the 1913 Alfa Romeo Castagna Aerodinamica.
4. I was an early fan, but as time passed, I became disillusioned with Fuller and pretty much all of his concepts. Don’t get me started.
So they filmed me expressing these admittedly negative views, and it apparently will be part of the exhibit, from March 31-July 29, 2012 at SFMOMA, 151 3rd St., SF. I like to accentuate the positive, but sometimes it’s just not possible.
“Hi Lloyd,
