Shelter: 40th Anniversary Edition (The Shelter Library of Building Books)

Throughout the 1960s and `70s, hundreds of unwashed, longhaired youth from around the world descended on the open foothills around Placitas, New Mexico, and established multiple communal hippie settlements. These youth had read of the Placitas scene in national magazines and counterculture books, or heard about it from other hippies; they were idealistic types from all around the world, and they came to the area to try to raise their own food, escape The Man, indulge in free love and mind-altering drugs, and live communally in tents, geodesic domes, adobe shacks, and experimental homes they built themselves out of plastic and scrap metal.This book, "Shelter" documents their bizarre housing experiments in wild detail. It also documents curvaceous mud homes in Africa, riverside huts in Yugoslavia, thatched huts in Ireland, homes in busses, homes in caves, dome homes, homes made of car parts, homes carved into mountainsides, homes made of hay, tipis, barns, gypsy tents, and more.If there's a strange kind of housing, you'll probably find it in here, and you'll probably be inspired by it."Building this house was more of like feeling where you went as you started working with it, you know, the material and just playing it from there," said one Placitas hippie interviewed in this book. "...It's like three dimensional sculpturing, you know, we just got into building a house out here that's like jewelry. ...OK, let me put it this way, the inspiration like as we move along through it, like I found it in [Stanley Kubrick's film] 2001, where the dude had finally split out of the satellite and was heading towards Jupiter, just as he was coming in, what they had done was they had used different types of film, infrared for one, and just taken a plane and flown over Grand Canyon at a high speed, low, what is created you know, is in some respects synonymous to what the house is, you know, and certainly our cell structure in our body is synonymous with that...."As you can probably tell, this is not "Better Homes and Gardens" or even "MTV Cribs." It's "Shelter," and it's a trip.

When I was just out of college I knew that owning is better than renting, and began scheming as to how I would accomplish that while working low-paying, high satisfaction jobs. I am not a hippie, but a how-to, DIY person. "Shelter" really fueled both the notion of what was possible and that things were even possible.Having grown up in a middle class environment, I could only think of stock homes. I like stock homes, but I also know that a lot of the materials that go into them means for a huge price tag. While I would never live in a dome or a yurt, I did see plenty of ideas here and there that were more interesting than my cookie-cutter childhood home.The second theme that "Shelter" delivers on is that of being able to do it myself. I was especially struck about the idea of buying a home on the cheap, improving it and flipping it. If you get George Nash's "Renovating Old Houses" he gets into the more nitty gritty of restoration. But, if you see some of these houses you know that, at the bottom as far as desirability goes, your house might still be better than renting (hey, it's yours).The diversity explored in this book included materials I am comfortable with. Stone and recycled timber are two areas I have always wanted to explore, while the piece on demolition makes me want to buy a house and rebuild it elsewhere.Today, I have a basic house that I did a lot of work on and will probably die in. It has flaws, but it is mine. I lost my old copy, and getting this reprint felt really great as I sit down after putting a new metal roof on my barn.Armchair renovator, dreamer, real doer, or just like big books "Shelter" is great.

The first copy I saw was the gi-normous newsprint copy on the cable table next to the bong and Whole Earth Catalog. But this volume is much more than a coffee table book for hippies. Somehow I managed to absorb a few of the lessons from it that have proven invaluable in real life. I just had to get a copy of the reprinted book to go with the old newsprint copy of the WEC I found at a yard sale. I showed the copy to Eustace Conway at a recent seminar where he said, "Oh, yeah this book is really useful and inspirational, I'll have to go back and read more of it." (like most people, he had mostly looked at the pictures and diagrams which can take a long time, without a thorough reading of the brilliant supporting text content). Being "hip" to architectural symbiosis is anything but trite. This book should be required reading.

Wow. Just wow. This is exactly what I needed. I am totally inspired by the idea of buying a piece of land and building myself a home "shelter" with what I can collect locally . This book shows shelters from all over the world for different climates with different techniques it does detail many of the method enough for you to try build but its more of a " look , this is how people built it when they needed shelter and they lived in it for a lifetime." it's not a typical house with permits style, it's a "lets build an awsome forest dwelling,cottage,cabin, longhouse, mud house style." If you have the will there is a way!

We have a copy of the book and purchased this for a friend. The first order was lost, and we were offered a refund and reorder. The second book was received right away. It is a fantastic book! Recommend to all who are contemplating building.

What a fun book of historical hippiness and 1970s. Actually well done, with decent (though strictly b&w) photos, blurbs, vignettes, anecdotes, manifestos, oddities and tales of the pot smoking, free love, communal, libertarian, antiwar, long hair era and its accompanying -- though strictly indescribable, weird and often pointless -- vernacular architecture. Written during the oddities of an era that brought so many great ideas and plain stupidity into our staid culture. Immersion into the variously far out, groovy, and totally boss. It's a book that focuses on the era's best joints for dropping out to crash away from the downers and flake.Chickabiddy, get it?

Es sind irre viele Bilder drin - alle sw - also auch mit geringen Englischkenntnissen ein tolles Buch zum blättern und staunen.Es werden verschiedenste Möglichkeiten aus aller Welt - aus alter und neuer Zeit, teuer und billig, aber meist billig, alternativ und konventionell, aber meist unkonventionell - gezeigt, wie man wohnen und bauen kann! Ich lernte gerade Zimmermann, als ich das Werk zum ersten Mal in die Hände bekam - ein Original aus den 70ern - ich war begeistert! Der Reprint hat das gleiche idiotische Format, aber was solls! Die Seitengröße hat auch was für sich. Man bekommt mehr Überblick dadurch, daß mehr auf eine Seite paßt.Ich habe die Strohballenhäuser zuerst in Findhorn (Schottland) wiedergetroffen und später auch in Deutschland. Auch die whirling logs und das Nebraska soddy oder Bauen mit Autoreifen sind mir vertraut geworden. So konnte ich später oft sagen: "Ja, kenn ich schon!"Richtig angetan hatten es mir aber sofort die Domes - geodätische Kuppeln! Zuerst gebaut (natürlich) in Deutschland ("Das Wunder von Jena"), dann aber in USA duch Buckminster Fuller richtig berühmt gemacht. Das war was für den progressiven Hippie! Schön, daß in dem Buch auch nicht die Schattenseiten verschwiegen werden. Es sind Berichte von Zeitzeugen bzw. Interviews drin von Leuten, die sowas gebaut und/oder darin gewohnt haben. Im Internet fand ich später einen Dome-calcuator als Javascript, mit dessen Hilfe ich zwei Stück gebaut habe.Man lernt hier ökologisches Denken - wer's noch nicht vorher konnte - also: Verwende die Baumaterialien, die du vor Ort vorfindest. Verwende gebrauchte Dinge. Lehm und Holz sind tolle Baustoffe! Silikon ist zwar eine tolle Sache, aber ohne ist es vielleicht besser; man muß ggf. etwas anders konstruieren. Leben, Bauen und Wohnen sollte naturverbunden sein. Permakultur.Jeder, der irgendwann mal irgendein Haus oder eine Hütte baut, sollte dies Buch wenigstens durchgeblättert haben!

Saw this in an air BnB and had to get it. Very interesting.

Its just pure inspiration for people who think about building any kind of shelter for themselves (house, summer cottage, animal housing). But don't expect to find any straight line on the pictures, nor any instructions in the text. This guy won't tell you "do this, do that". This book message is : Why don't you think by yourself? Determine your needs, consider the environment, look at what our ancestors built and build what makes sense! The author also writes about alternative energies and especially low-tech alternatives that could be implemented by ordinary people. It was easy to read, even if English is my second language.

Shelter is a wonderful manual of wonderful building ideas. I would be the first to recommend its jam packed pages to even the most partial building enthusiast. I love shelter and it’s legacy is very important, particularly in today’s world of disposable nonsense. Buy it and be inspired to build wonderful things.

belle idee x la vostra casa