I get lots of calls to do interviews these days, many of which I turn down due to lack of time. I think it’s partly staying alive long enough so people know your work, and also, a new-found interest in creating your own shelter in this world of absurdly-high-priced homes and high rents.
A late development is that our work seems to be of interest in other countries, almost more so than in the USA — Scotland, Ireland, England, Germany, Spain, Austria, Japan, Korea. It brings to mind how popular Jimi Hendrix was in London before Americans found out who he was (not that I’m on the level of Jimi Hendrix, but the principal is the same).
At the risk of repetition, here’s another interview (edited) — this one by Gearoid Muldowney, of Superfolk, a design studio that works “…in the overlaps of art, architecture, craft and design strategy” in County Mayo in Western Ireland.
Lloyd Kahn's Radical Honesty
Building a Life: Lloyd Kahn's Radical Honesty
"Part of any experimentation is that some things work and some don't," Lloyd reflects. Later, he will tell me, "I'm not afraid to say I made a mistake. Most people can't admit that. I thought one way before, and now I think differently. Here are the reasons why I've changed my mind."
This matter-of-fact honesty, along with his deep curiosity and desire to share, is one of Lloyd's defining qualities. His pursuit of honesty extends to his love of natural materials and vernacular methods of buildings. Having read his books, and blogs, his Substack and his Instagram for years — I think that his openness to try and to fail is also part of what allows us — his readers — to feel connected to him.
One of Lloyd’s greatest moments of radical honesty came when he rejected domes. In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Lloyd was immersed in building domes when he realized that they simply did not work. Deciding he "…didn't want any more domes on my karma," he made the very bold move of taking his bestselling books (Domebook One and Domebook 2) out of print to embark on a different odyssey—studying and sharing homemade and/or vernacular and traditional buildings. This journey resulted in Shelter. He smiles and says, "Today, Shelter is everyone's favorite building book. It's amazing — I find people all over the world who have been influenced by it."
But first, I have to ask him about finding the courage to turn his back on his own research work.
In the year 1970 you published Domebook One and then in 1971 Domebook 2, which went on to sell 160,000 copies, partly inspired, I think, by Buckminster Fuller. And then you were building domes, teaching domes, talking and writing about domes… So much of your life was focused on domes. You were a dome evangelist and then you had the realization that domes just didn’t work? How did that realization strike you and how did it feel to turn your back on your own work?
Yes, Buckminster Fuller had inspired us to make domes, though it turned out that he was not the inventor of the dome at all. I was running a program at a hippie high school in the Santa Cruz Mountains on 40 acres of land. We built 17 domes and tried all kinds of experiments with materials and geometry. Domebook 2 was very successful. And we had maybe a quarter of a million people who thought that domes were the cool way to build, they were hip. Domes were new — we were going to “…do more with less.”
But I'd been having doubts about domes for a while when we went out into the country to do Domebook 2. We had rented an old resort on a lake, in the Santa Barbara mountains in the off-season. As we were heading out to the mountains, driving along, I was looking at farm buildings by the side of the road, and thinking, these are so simple. A vertical wall and you have a roof — that's one plane on top of the walls. The overhang keeps most of the water off the windows. And it's easy to put a roof on it. One plane, not all the angles and seams of a dome roof. These buildings are all designed out of practicality and not from an abstract concept.
By then I knew that domes tended to leak and were hard to subdivide. It started me thinking. With regular buildings if you want to add another room, you just build a roof off of an outside vertical wall. But, if you have a dome, it has so many changing facets, you have to connect the roof to all those facets to add to it — very complex. We went ahead and did Domebook 2. But by the time it sold 160,000 copies, I’d realized that domes didn't work.
What did you do?
I called my agent—by then, Random House was distributing Domebook 2—and said, 'Don, I'm going to take the book out of print.' He said, 'Are you crazy? I said, 'No, I don't want any more domes on my karma.' I took the book out of print. Then I traveled across this country (USA} and across Canada, shooting photos of buildings. Layer that year I got a $200 round trip flight to Ireland and took two Nikons, one loaded with color slide film, the other with Tri X black and white. I traveled around Ireland and England, studying buildings and shooting photos.
And looking back on that time now, are there things that you learned and brought with you from your time working with domes?
Part of any kind of experimentation and testing is that some things will work, and some things won't. A great thing about my experience with domes was understanding geometry and the basic solids and the Archimedean solids. I'd never been good at mathematics. But the fact that I could see that there are only five shapes that you can make where all the faces, angles and edges are identical: a tetrahedron, an octahedron, a cube, a dodecahedron, and an icosahedron. Learning that was wonderful.
Also, with a dome there is the circle, which we loved. (Hey, it was the ‘60s!) We called it “circle madness.” It feels good to be in a circular room. But also, I discovered that being around materials that have the least amount of molecular rearranging are the ones that feel the best. Like a straw bale house just feels so good. It's not something that you can verify scientifically. But adobe or wood feels so much better to be around, as opposed to say, plastic or metal. A dome just doesn't lend itself very well to natural materials.
The dome that I had here (in Bolinas) was I think was the nicest dome ever built; by that I mean aesthetically. There was a two-page colour photo of it in LIFE magazine in 1976. I remember I was in London when the magazine came out and that issue had Mick Jagger on the cover!
That must have been some moment!
It was. That dome had a wood feeling to it and the connectors were silver stainless steel strap and pipe that I galvanized. It was covered with hand-split shakes. The materials were all livable with. But there were just too many things wrong. I couldn't add on to it. I couldn't subdivide it. Beds and refrigerators and dresser drawers are rectangular, so when I tried to fit them into a round space I had a problem. So I tore it down — took it apart and sold it.
We were going down the wrong path with domes. Then coming to Ireland and England and studying the roots of building was all so exciting to me largely because I’d gone so far in the other direction — mathematics and plastics — for so long.
Tell me more about your time in Europe and how this trip fed into the book that became Shelter?
In Ireland and England, I had my 12-year-old son Peter with me and we hitchhiked around and rented a car part of the time. We had maybe a couple of weeks roaming around in Ireland and then took the ferry across to England. I was so excited.
One day Peter and I were hitchhiking and we got a ride from a salesman, heading east, and he found out I was interested in old buildings. He said to me, “You see that building over there? The reason it looks so good is because the bricks are made from the area right around here, and they're the color of the landscape. The roof is slate from nearby quarries.” It was the first time I thought seriously about local materials. It made me think about how appropriate they are, as opposed to taking a design based on an icosahedron and using plastics and mathematics to build a dome house — which takes no account of the weather or the landscape or traditions. It all resonated.
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I had some friends who had rented a house in a small village on the Thames River near Reading, which was maybe 20 miles up the river from London. The village was kind of dilapidated. There was the main manor house, a church, the alms house and the mill on the river. They had rented what had been the baker's house. It was like stepping back into the Middle Ages. The buildings were all built with local materials and based on local conditions: the weather, the direction the wind and storms came from — it was eye-opening.
After all this travel, we came back and I did Shelter in 1973.
And what was the response amongst your peers to your move away from domes?
A lot of people were really upset with me when I quit domes. Domes are very photogenic, especially the ones we built at Pacific High School, with high school kids building their own homes. We used to do dome slide shows playing the Rolling Stones!
There was a big building conference in Los Angeles called Habitat for Humanity in the early ‘70s. I was one of the scheduled speakers. My audience expected to see slides of domes. But I had just come back from Europe, so I showed a photo of a thatched cottage along the coast in Ireland. And I said, “So, you see the stone walls around the field? They picked up the stones when they cleared the field. And with them they built the fences, and they also built the walls of the house. And then they took the barley that had been harvested, and used the stalks to make the thatched roofs.
And the reason that this looks so good, is because it's built of local materials, and it's built from tradition, and not from wise-ass mathematics, you know, using polyhedrons! And the audience — they practically threw tomatoes at me, they were so upset.
You know, most people just can't admit that they made a mistake. But I said okay, that's what I thought then, that's not what I think now. Here are the reasons why I've changed my mind.
Then I wrote a newsprint publication called Refried Domes and so it was like “Okay! If you want to build a dome, here are my five years’ experience building them and why I think they don't work as homes. But, if you still want to build one, here are the mathematics.”
Today, Shelter seems to be everybody's favorite building book. It's amazing — I find people in all over the world who have been influenced by it.”
It's one of my favorite books! What are your favorites of your own books?
Shelter is kind of in a category of its own.
Then Homework is the sequel to Shelter, it came out in 2004. But for me Builders of the Pacific Coast is my best book because it's an odyssey. You get to ride shotgun with me and meet these builders and see the things they built, mostly in British Columbia.
I get the sense you really enjoy meeting and spending time with people who make their own buildings?
Yeah. I really like builders. Or farmers — I've never met a farmer I didn't like. Builders and farmers have to deal with real things, the weather and the elements and physical materials. It's different from this large group of people who deal with computers, or the financial world: contracts, stocks, bonds, insurance policies and banks — nothing to do with the physical world.
And this continues to appeal to people today. It is an aspiration for many younger people to build their own home, to be self-sufficient, to “…deal with real things.”
It's been really encouraging to have all these people coming up and saying, we're interested, you know, we like what you were doing back then. But, I have to say to them, that's not really possible any more in many parts of America.
When I came here to Bolinas (a small town across the Golden Gate Bridge on the ocean) in the early ‘70s, the land that I built my house on was $6,000, and my building permit was $200. At that time, there were maybe 30 of us in this little town and the outskirts, building our own homes. The prevailing idea at the time was to get 10 acres in the country and to build a log cabin or an adobe house, and be as independent as possible.
I've never had a mortgage, and I've never paid rent. But that's not nearly as possible these days. Now, the building permits are probably $60,000, materials are super expensive. If you're close to a great city, like within an hour or two of New York or San Francisco or LA, or Austin or, you know, Chicago, the building codes are going to be too restrictive and expensive.
Another thing, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was so cheap to get by. That also made it possible to build your own home. Back then, materials were cheap, but now we’ve used up all our easily extractable resources in America. Like lumber — prices have skyrocketed.
What is your advice for young people today?
The main thing that is still the same and hasn't changed: use your hands to create shelter. You have to think outside the box now, but I still encourage people to use their hands to do whatever they can.
If I were young now, I would look around in the cities and in the towns for an old house that needs fixing up. I would look at getting a house that's got a good foundation, in a neighborhood maybe where the crack dealers have just been chased out — where you've already got water, sewage and power. That's one option nowadays.
I also tell people that self-sufficiency is not attainable, it's like perfection. You never quite get there, but the more you can do for yourself, the better. Maybe you're just going to grow parsley on your fire escape in New York, you know, but that sort of spirit. And that's why I'm excited by the 30-year-olds — the millennials — showing this interest in our work these days.
Wonderful interview. Lloyd has lived the dream so many of us have and I really admire him for that.
I'm so nostalgic for that time in the 60s and 70s when you didn't have to be rich and you could live just about anywhere. Lloyd was the right guy at the right time in the right place and he was smart enough to know it. Always an inspiration.
Great post, Lloyd! A just remember when we visited the Ford Museum outside Detroit and, among all innovations post-WWII (geodesic domes, modern planes and recreational vehicles), there was one dome structure referenced to you, and a text explaining your early work in Life magazine and Whole Earth Catalog. It made sense to find you there :)