handmade house

Lloyd Kahn on Tiny Houses – lecture in Vancouver

April 19, 2012

Lloyd Kahn, Editor in Chief and founder of Shelter Publications, is a North American authority on the handmade house. Visit Shelter for a full list of his book titles on this topic.

“If I Had a Hammer? What Do You Mean If?”

April 19, 2010

Before I start, I’m asking on behalf of the owners of this house that nobody reposts or reproduces any of these images anywhere without my permission. Like a lot of people who have built their own houses in the woods, the owners, who are relatives of mine, appreciate their privacy and feel a bit negative about seeing their house all over the internet.

Categories: architecture, British Columbia, Canadian design, design, green, Uncategorised, video

At the lake

August 6, 2009

Today we spent the afternoon diving down and ripping out water lily roots from the muddy lake bottom, because even though the lilies are beautiful, they’re an introduced species and they’re slowly filling the lake.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Cosmic dust, on tumblr

April 16, 2009

If tumblr is a bellwether—and it may not be—then the sixties & seventies are back, in style if not in substance. So many of tumblr’s weird little blogs, each of them a kind of eclectic personal bulletin board, feature this kind of rock and roll Hair: The Musical meets back-to-the-land handmade-house thing.

Categories: architecture, design, fashion, green, interiors, Uncategorised

Handbuilt houses of the Pacific coast

February 10, 2009

Sometimes after seeing too many chichi, precious, and citified houses, too much shiny, overproduced design, and everything just starts to look too estranged from the materials it was made from, as an antidote I go look at pictures of handbuilt houses.

Categories: architecture, British Columbia, design, green, Uncategorised

Handmade houses in Christiania

January 31, 2009

Maybe it’s because these houses are reminiscent of the tradition of handmade houses here on the West Coast, but there’s something pleasingly familiar about the eccentric wooden buildings of Christiana, the surreal, semi-autonomous, rebel neighbourhood of Copenhagen.

Categories: architecture, British Columbia, design, Uncategorised

Round windows

January 6, 2009

Why are round windows so uncommon in North America? Not a rhetorical question. When you do see them here, either in house or garden, they seem magical and out of the ordinary. Round, eye-level windows are quite prevalent in many other places, including Central and South America, the Middle East, Africa and parts of Europe.

Categories: architecture, design, interiors, landscaping, Uncategorised

This blog is a long, somewhat messy photo essay on the history and politics of design. Design's socio-historical context—that is, the constraints and influences on the way we make objects, dwellings and cities—seems too often ignored. We no longer know where our styles, tastes or objects really come from, and this damages our creativity and sense of meaning. Historical knowledge is so fugitive in the New World, with everything so decontextualized in the rapid flow of commodities and images. Don't even get me started on tumblr and pinterest. As Fran Lebowitz said, "Designers now, they all have these things called mood boards. I suppose they think a sense of discovery equals invention. It would be as if every writer had a board with paragraphs of other writers—'Oh, I'll take a little bit of this, and that, he was really good.' Yes, he was really good! And that is not a mood board, it is a stealing board." As for the sort of design I'm personally interested in, full disclaimer.....read more ____________________________________

To read about my book project on Vancouver's UN-Habitat Forum event of 1976 concerning just and sustainable urban settlements, click here. Few know that Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Paolo Soleri and Maggie & Pierre Trudeau, along with many thousands of others, came to Vancouver in 1976 to talk about better, safer, fairer and greener cities worldwide. In fact it was the founding conference of UN Habitat, an agency built around a foundational document called The Vancouver Declaration. My book is about what happened that year and is a snapshot not just of Vancouver but of how people around the world began to view cities and themselves differently in the wake of, among other things, the first oil crisis. ____________________________________

handmade house

Lloyd Kahn on Tiny Houses – lecture in Vancouver

“If I Had a Hammer? What Do You Mean If?”

At the lake

Cosmic dust, on tumblr

Handbuilt houses of the Pacific coast

Handmade houses in Christiania

Round windows

About

Search Blog

That essay on colonial heritage hipsters

Read this on cities

No ads or sponsored content

This Blog

Book in Progress: Habitat

Tweets by @ounodesign

Ouno is on Remodelista

Ouno Design’s Bookshop

Ouno Design Shop

Write me

Popular Posts

Archives