Home Work

Home Work Synopsis

Building on the enormous success of the original Shelter, Lloyd Kahn continues his odyssey of finding and exploring the most magnificent and unusual hand-built houses in existence. Among the intriguing domiciles described in Home Work are a Japanese-style stilt house accessible only by a cable across a river; a stone house in a South African valley whose roof serves as a baboon trampoline; multi-level treehouses on the South China Sea; and a bottle house in the Nevada desert. Over 1,500 photos illustrate various innovative architectural styles and natural building materials that have gained popularity in the last two decades such as cob, papercrete, bamboo, adobe, strawbale, timber framing, and earthbags.

• Master builder Louie Frazier's Japanese-style pole house in Northern California, reachable on a 500-foot cable across a river
• Ian MacLeod's handbuilt stone house in South Africa, where baboons jump on the roof at night
• Ma Page's bottle house in the Nevada desert
• Artist Michael Kahn's semi-subterranean sculptural village in Arizona
• Bill and Athena Steen's strawbale houses
• Ianto Evans' cob houses in Oregon
• The Archlibre group of countercultural builders in the French Pyrenees
• Bill Coperthwaite's spectacular 3-story yurt in the Maine woods
• Bill Castle's finely-crafted log home and sauna in the NY Appalachians
• A commune in the Tennessee mountains
• The "Flying Concrete" brothers in Mexico and their far-out sculptural structures
• Barns in California, Washington, and Connecticut
• Photo-essays of Lloyd Kahn's trips to Nevada, the Mississippi Delta, Costa Rica, Nova Scotia, and Baja California
• Photos of buildings all over the world by photographers Yoshio Komatsu and Kevin Kelly + more, lots more.…

Shelter, it turns out, had a major influence on builders, and included are buildings our 1973 book inspired, so this is truly a sequel.