Tiny House in a Landscape
This week’s Tiny House in a Landscape is a series of photographs taken by Jennifer Borek who publishes her own blog at www.kannallc.com. Jennifer took a tour of the Kansas prairie today where she is temporarily living (long-term contract).
The photos are of the Kaw House a reconstructed model built in 1961. The government built these on the Kaw Reservation. However, the Kaws preferred living in their own tipis and bark-and-mat lodges and they ended up being used as shelters for their animals.
Thank you Jennifer for sharing your photos and this interesting bit of history.
The Ephemeral Architecture of Burning Man
All over the world, participants of Burning Man live the entire year in anticipation of the month of August. In about two weeks, the yearly event in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada (which is expected to host 60,000 people) will begin, and Black Rock City will burst out of the desert floor like a giant flower. During the last week of August until Labor Day, these residents (called Burners) will live in their own shelters that they’ve brought to the event. These shelters take on many forms: from berber tents and Monkey Huts to flamboyant RVs and festooned Costco carports. Black Rock City has it all.
Phillipe Glade has photographed and blogged about most of these structures during his years of attending Burning Man. His beautiful photographs have now been published in his new book, Black Rock City, NV: The Ephemeral Architecture of Burning Man. The book is 112 pages and contains nearly 200 photos of the structures and shelters built by the denizens of Burning Man.
In a way, the dwellings of Burning Man can be described as vernacular. They are created specifically for the harsh, desert conditions and creative atmosphere of the fifth largest city in Nevada. The structures have to be able to withstand the desert’s 50 mile per hour winds, the boiling sun and allow for airflow and enough room for communal living, cooking and sleeping.
Vertical Camp is covered in garden shade material to allow for airflow and shade from the sun. Downstairs is a large kitchen and living space and the compartments on the top floors contain the bedrooms of the camp residents. Some bedrooms even have faux fur-covered beds and bedside dressers. The views from the top deck are incredible. Continue Reading »
Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties
The other day I received a package in the mail from Shelter Publications, located in Bolinas, California. They had contacted me earlier in the week to see if I would review some of there books and that they have a book on Tiny Houses in the works.
They sent some terrific books and I have decided to share with you the oldest one, because it has some neat ideas and really gets back to the basics of building construction.
In the classic book Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties: And How to Build Them, D. C. Beard covers a wide array of possibilities for building your own dwelling out of nothing but materials provided by nature. This book was originally published in 1914 and Shelter Publications has chosen to reprint it and make it available again.
D. C. Beard explains how to construct a variety of worry-free shelters appropriate to a natural environment that is by turns both friendly and foreboding. Included are a sod house for the lawn, a treetop house, over-water camps, and an American log cabin. I even found a shanty plan that looked remarkably familiar to the Sonoma Shanty. It just had a lower pitched roof, otherwise the dimensions are almost identical.
Fully recognizing that the outdoorsman builds a shelter with the intention of inhabiting it, Beard explains how to build hearths and chimneys, notched log ladders, and even how to rig secret locks. Illustrated throughout with instructional line drawings, Shelters, Shacks and Shanties goes back to the can-do spirit of the American frontier and belongs in your library of tiny house books.
I really like this book, the sketches are wonderful, the information is timeless. If you are looking for a book to get you back to the basics, this is it.
by Kent Griswold (Tiny House Blog)
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