Handmade house
January 19, 2011 11:33 AM Subscribe
Where is this house? It appears in Handmade houses : A guide to the woodbutcher's art (1973), but I looked in the book and there seemed to be no information about where the house is.
Best answer: Nice going, jon1270. A friend of mine built one of the houses in that book and surmised it was on the west coast:
Maybe about half of the photos shown are from the Handmade Houses
book. None of them are of the house I built (or of the few others in
the book in which I had a hand). I knew the guy who built the house
in the picture in question, and I know about where the house was
located (the Mendocino Coast). But it was the fancy of the book's
authors to not give the names of the owners or the builders -- or the
houses' location -- on the grounds that the houses shown were
'underground' or 'countercultural' constructs -- outside the building
code and therefore illegal and threatened with demolition if the
authorities could locate them. This was totally untrue of the house I
built (we had building permit, engineer approval & all), along with
(apparently/obviously) many others. OTOH, it was certainly true of
the great bulk of the houses shown in the book. And I think it's safe
to assume that very few of them, 40+ years later, are still standing.
One of my favourites, and the long-time home of one of my best
friends, burned to the ground in the blink of an eye a couple of
years ago. He and his family escaped unharmed, but in their pajamas
and with virtually nothing else. Sic transit gloria mundi.
posted by Sublimity at 1:51 PM on January 19, 2011
Maybe about half of the photos shown are from the Handmade Houses
book. None of them are of the house I built (or of the few others in
the book in which I had a hand). I knew the guy who built the house
in the picture in question, and I know about where the house was
located (the Mendocino Coast). But it was the fancy of the book's
authors to not give the names of the owners or the builders -- or the
houses' location -- on the grounds that the houses shown were
'underground' or 'countercultural' constructs -- outside the building
code and therefore illegal and threatened with demolition if the
authorities could locate them. This was totally untrue of the house I
built (we had building permit, engineer approval & all), along with
(apparently/obviously) many others. OTOH, it was certainly true of
the great bulk of the houses shown in the book. And I think it's safe
to assume that very few of them, 40+ years later, are still standing.
One of my favourites, and the long-time home of one of my best
friends, burned to the ground in the blink of an eye a couple of
years ago. He and his family escaped unharmed, but in their pajamas
and with virtually nothing else. Sic transit gloria mundi.
posted by Sublimity at 1:51 PM on January 19, 2011
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It looked very familiar to me. If it's the one I'm thinking of, I would've seen it in a book called Woodstock Handmade Houses, published around the same time, my copy of which I seem to have misplaced.
And guess what -- your pick is the first hit from a Google image search for "Woodstock Handmade Houses."
posted by jon1270 at 11:53 AM on January 19, 2011