I’ve been reading all about small homes. I would simply LOVE to build my own home in the woods somewhere, a la Thoreau. I’ve been reading Home Work and Building Green, two books about how to build your own shelter. Here are some quotes I like so far.
“Who could deny that the human body is a mind-boggling miracle? Imagine: each of us is safely housed within a bundle of blood, bone and guts nurturing a little glow of life while suspended in a sea of constant change and danger… Housing, likewise, originally developed slowly within particular cultures and in response to specific climates and environments. Using materials from the site and techniques developed out of long experience with an exact location and climate, each culture around the world crafted a unique style of housing from the fabric of their surroundings. In other words, traditional housing approaches were specific to the culture, climate, and environment from which they sprung… We live in a different world today. People are moving around; cultures are intermingling. An urban lifestyle predominates that doesn’t change with the seasons and isn’t connected to a specific climate or locale. The glue that holds us together is a world economy of frantic buying and selling to each other… The strength of this approach, its apparent flexibility, is also its fatal flaw. Housing solutions that don’t arise out of a slow, intricate interaction between a place and a people cannot possibly hope to nurture the delicate interaction between that place and those people that’s required for the survival of both”
–Building Green
And from Home Work:
“22 years later my reaction to the place in my dream started to take shape. I soon realized the start of the shape was something I’d had the whole time.”
–Mike Basich
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