This is one the best building books I’ve ever seen. These cabins are tuned in, just right. I’ll bet they are all designed and built by builders — refreshingly, not by architects.
Photos are elegant, layout outstanding.
Everything is just right.
At this time only available from publisher in Canada. (I’m encouraging Finella to get it more widely distributed.}
I totally recommend this book.
(I apologize for my photos of the pages, shot on iPhone, not greatest quality of reproduction.)
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.
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
Sent us by Maui Surfer
From Kevin Kelly
This the last part of a 7-minute video titled “Shelter – A Video about author Lloyd Kahn” made by Jason Sussberg (shooting 35mm film!) in 2009, when I was 75. He shows Lesley and me doing stuff around the homestead.
Jason included a minute or so of me skateboarding, with the sound guy on his crew (a skater) skating behind me and alongside me with the heavy 35mm camera.
Then I sat on the curb (in front of my skateboard) talking about housing.
Sorry this is so blurry, Jason’s work is clear, we copied this from YouTube.
Hi Lloyd,
Here’s another amazing wooden Gothic style church built in nine months by seven carpenters and a manager in 1866. Old St. Paul’s Wellington. The ceiling timbers are Kauri, a native New Zealand hardwood.
Kind regards,
Bill Choquette
Wellington
P.S.: Been posting infrequently lately due to overwhelming busyness, both personal and professional. Also now deeply into my next book, provisionally titled Live From California, a sort of autobiography, which includes a native Californian’s view of what went on in the ’60s.
Hi Lloyd,
I thought of you when I saw these timbers in St. Michael’s Church, Wellington, New Zealand. These timbers are only 100 years old but look medieval. Probably built by very skilled emigré English carpenters but I don’t really know who made them.
Keep up the writing,
Bill Choquette
Wellington
From the multi-talented Steen family.
I built an unusual building for my Jungian Analyst and East Asian Medicine-MA partner, Laura, who had a vision. She saw a 5-sided first floor with a 6-sided second floor with a light tube or skylight through the middle. About 1600 sq. ft in all. It took me about three years to finish, and it is her offices: studio on second and meditation room on the third. Its secondary purpose is to bring geometric energies into the earth for healing of the planet. It is based on the number 11, the number of the Tao. Heaven above, earth below.
–James Ward
