Tiny Homes Simple Shelter Scaling Back in the 21st Century Book Review
Lloyd Kahn
Shelter Publications ($24.95)
by Niels Strandskov
In the xxx-nine years since he published Shelter, his offset compendium of alternatives to the standard American way of building, Lloyd Kahn has created a movement that defies like shooting fish in a barrel categorization, just is instantly recognizable to its adherents. His latest work,Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter, Scaling Dorsum in the 21st Century, focuses on houses under 500 square feet, but his books Homework andBuilders of the Pacific Coastinclude many adequately big structures. Some are paw-congenital, without even a cordless drill on site, while some are put together using the normal techniques of journeyman carpenters. Some are relatively expensive, others built most for free, with material scrounged from the trash or cut fresh from a forest. Scanning through these works, however, the gestalt of houses that make people experience good to look at or alive in is immediately apparent.
Kahn came to publishing almost by blow. A devotee of Buckminster Fuller's pop geodesic domes in the belatedly 1960s and early 1970s, Kahn found few resource available to the DIY dome-builder. So he, with a few collaborators, put together some primers on dome construction. Later selling out many print runs, even so, Kahn soured on the whole concept of domes, which were too oft drafty, leaky, and inefficient in their use of space. He turned his attention to traditional methods of edifice (with a few starkly innovative designs thrown in) and published the briskly selling guideShelter, which prophesied a render to the ancient traditions of edifice by manus, with by and large natural materials.
WithTiny Homes, Kahn brings his gaze to carry on the elegance of limits in contemporary architecture. Far from the McMansion-filled and heavily foreclosed suburbs of the car culture, we find a distributed community of small builders, self-builders, and bricoleurs who desire to go on their dwellings at a human scale and in a funky aesthetic. As with his previous work, Kahn is committed to letting his subjects chronicle their own stories. While a significant amount of the text and photos inTiny Homes is by Kahn himself, a large role of this volume highlights the builders' ain narratives, which are often heartfelt stories of the philosophies that propelled them to begin edifice. Although this makes for a slightly disjointed structure, information technology does permit the reader to experience the emotional drama backside each beam in a fashion that a standard architecture text might not.
WhileShelter andHomework meandered effectually their subjects with a countercultural lack of concern for specificity or linear explication, andBuilders of the Pacific Coast narrowed the focus to a very limited fix of possibilities,Tiny Homes explores the rush of small homebuilders in exhaustive particular. A large department of the volume is devoted to listings and descriptions of modest business firm builders for hire, with contact information and price ranges. Kahn is very openly an advocate for the builders and designers he admires, but his tastes are cosmic plenty to requite the reader a fairly broad range of possibilities to consider.
The real joy of Kahn'due south work, which comes through admirably inTiny Homes, is in his lively full-colour photographs. While Kahn's cocky-taught fashion might non always provide the well-nigh architecturally accurate view of his visual subjects, his informed discernment tends to bring out details of emotional grade that a more than polished photographer might miss. He often creates collages of several dissimilar shots at various angles, with the edges of the amalgamation left rough. These panoramic views cleverly evoke both the funkiness of the designs and the piecemeal nature of their construction processes. Kahn'south idiosyncrasies here provide a treat for the puzzle-solving reader, as the exact relationship of some of the shots is a bit obscure. Turning the book this way and that to visualize the three-dimensional experience of the rooms and exteriors Kahn shoots leaves the reader with a far more holistic understanding of these constructions.
Tiny Homes celebrates the pocket-sized and the cute in a way that few architecture books can match. Lloyd Kahn's verve for his subjects, and their common respect for his inspiring works, create community out of the prosaic rap of a hammer on nails and the exultant scent of freshly cut pine. Resurgent nature, rebuilt communities, and resistance to the hum-drum pressures of the Rat Race find their embodiment in this large, lovely book of little houses.
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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012
Source: https://www.raintaxi.com/tiny-homes-simple-shelter-scaling-back-in-the-21st-century/
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