LK Interview in Apartamento Magazine, Summer, 2024

Interview by Lukas Feiress in apartamento — an everyday life interiors magazine — issue #33
Photography by Jelka von Langen and Roman Goebel Kahn

www.apartamentomagazine.com

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Hailed as ‘the king of D.I.Y. dwellings’ and ‘the guru of guerrilla architecture’ by the New York Times, the now 89-year-old builder, publisher, and storyteller Lloyd Kahn is truly one of a kind. I first met Lloyd four years ago when Swiss architect Leopold Banchini and I went to visit him and his late wife, Lesley Creed, at their self-built half-acre homestead in Bolinas, California. We came with the idea to dedicate our contribution to the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale to Lloyd’s work — in particular, the content of his iconic nuts-and-bolts counterculture guides to organic architecture: Domebook One (1970), Domebook 2 (1971), and Shelter (1973), all of which influence contemporary architectural practice and imagination to this day.

Alongside the legacy of similar publications at the time, such as the Whole Earth Catalog (1968), for which Lloyd served as shelter editor, his books aimed to give agency to the people and remain highly successful how-to bibles for owner-built construction. More than just manuals, these publications also tell beautiful tales of folks who decided to create their households differently, reimagining a way of life more consciously related to the environment, liberated from capitalism and its alienating methods of production.

It’s only after arriving in Italy and seeing our installation in Venice dedicated to him and his work that I believe Lloyd fully realised the scope of our admiration for him. Since then, we have become dear friends and travel buddies. Through many long conversations during our trips and on the phone, Lloyd has become something of a role model to me for how to stay physically and mentally fit, curious, open-minded, and radically true to yourself. And he still has lots of stories to tell.

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 Do you feel like you’ve made any significant sacrifices to live like this? 

I made a financial sacrifice when I quit being an insurance broker. I’m the only person I know in my high school or college that started smoking marijuana and dropped out. I grew my hair long and started hanging out with younger people. All of my friends who stayed in business have a lot more money than I do. So in a sense that was a sacrifice, but I gained freedom and a much more interesting life — which is still kind of like walking a tightrope. 

Can you describe where you live for someone who’s never been there? 

It’s on the ocean, about an hour from San Francisco along the coast or over windy mountain roads. For me, it’s perfect because I like the sort of semi-isolation. There were about 35 of us building our own homes in the ‘70s in and around Bolinas. It was one of the last places in the Bay Area where it was inexpensive to buy land. We were lucky: the land was $6,500, the building permit $200, and the water metre $250. Now building permits are probably $50,000, and if you buy a water metre it can cost up to $300,000. So it’s pretty much impossible for anybody to do now what a lot of us were able to do back then.

I remember when we drove from San Francisco to your place four years ago, there was no turn off sign for Bolinas on the road.

Yeah, people kept taking down the signs until finally the state gave up on replacing them. 

Let’s talk about your home. It’s a special place that you built with your late wife, Lesley. You made all of the structures on your property with salvaged materials from different places. It’s like a huge collage. How did you guys start? 

I started out with a geodesic dome and then built a hexagonal 30-foot tower next to it. But when I gave up on domes, I tore the dome down and built a rectangular structure that I connected to the tower. By now we have a number of small buildings on the property, which is about 100 ft × 200 ft. 

A lot of the wood in these buildings is used. I either bought it used or tore down buildings myself for the wood. Where I’m sitting right now, the whole building is made with material from old Navy barracks on Treasure Island in San Francisco. When I quit building domes in the early ’70s, I got a pickup truck and started going around to debris bins in the cities where the contractors would throw out old windows and doors, and pick those things up. Also, I made shakes, which are shingles that are split rather than sawn. There would be redwood logs down at the beach when I first moved to town, and I’d go down there and cut them up and split them into shakes for the roof or the sides of the buildings. 

You lived in the same place for over half a century and raised your two sons there with Lesley. What are your favourite memories?

When Lesley was here, just a lot of times. I was thinking the other day about this one time, we were laughing so hard that I fell on the floor. I couldn’t even stand up because she said something so funny. Moments like that. 

I remember when we first met, you said that Lesley was the captain of the ship and that she ran this place. 

She engineered everything around here. The garden is totally hers. I got the firewood and would do the compost, but she planted and watered and tended things. She set up the house. I’m starting to do my own cooking now, and it’s all laid out for me: all the pots and pans and utensils and all the things in the pantry. All the wheat and barley and the rice. I’m still utilising everything she put together, even the way the kitchen is arranged. Now that she’s not around, there are a lot of things that she did that I have to do, so it’s keeping me pretty busy. 

We kind of contextualized where and how you lived the last 50 years, but where, when, and how did you grow up?

I was born in 1935 in San Francisco, during the end of the Great Depression. There were 26 kids on our block, and there was no television. We listened to radio programs after school, and then went out and played — no parental supervision, no Little League. I had two brothers, and when I was 12 years old, we adopted three kids — the children of my father’s cousin, who was killed along with his wife in an automobile accident. So then we had six kids in the family. My parents loved each other, and I had a happy childhood. And then I went to Stanford and graduated in 1957. 

What did you graduate in?

I majored in economics because there were no Friday classes. I could take off on Thursday at noon and go over to Santa Cruz. I’d spend half my week there surfing. I went from being a Stanford student and part-time surfer to being a part-time Stanford student and a more or less full-time surfer. 

What did you do after graduating?

I spent two years in the Air Force. From 1958 to 1960, I ran a newspaper on Sembach Air Base in Germany called the Sembach Jet Gazette. I was also in charge of the photo lab. In 1960 I came back to San Francisco and went into the insurance business with my father, brother, and uncle.

How did that go? 

We were doing pretty well. My brother and I started to make good money, but at the same time I was building and remodelling my house after work every night and on the weekends. I started liking the building more and more and the business less and less. And I started smoking pot. I quit the insurance business and went to work as a carpenter.

That’s a rather brave move and quite a change of lifestyle. How did you start?  

I had some rudimentary carpentry experience. But I had to learn as I went along. I was fascinated with building, and it was better than wearing a suit and tie. I liked builders, and I liked the smell of wood and lumberyards. So I got into that world and worked on that house for a year or two. That’s how it all started.

Where did you go next?

I moved to Big Sur and built a house there over the course of another year. I also did some small-scale farming on the hillside by that house. We lived down there for a total of three years. During that time, Buckminster Fuller came to the Esalen Institute, which was a nearby resort of hot springs where they had seminars on weekends. Fuller talked about building lightweight geodesic domes. I was fascinated, and started building domes after I finished my house.

Was that also around the same time you started working for the Whole Earth Catalog?

When I started building domes, I got the instructions from Popular Science magazine — the mathematics for building what they called the Sun Dome. Eventually people found out about my domes, and they started writing me letters asking for instructions. I responded to these letters, and I soon realised I was writing the same thing over and over again. I thought, ‘I should print something up on a mimeograph machine.’ At the same time, I should throw in some stuff I’d learned on organic gardening and homesteading. You know, tools, wood stoves, chainsaws. 

About that time, I met Stewart Brand, who was starting to put together the Whole Earth Catalog, and he was much farther along than I was. So, instead of publishing something myself, I joined up with him and became the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. Working with Stewart was my second experience with publishing since the Air Force newspaper, but the methodology for publishing had completely changed in those days from linotype, which was what we used in Germany in the ’50s, to the IBM Selectric Composer, which was a $10,000 electric typewriter where you typed up the text and pasted it down on the page. That page was photographed at the printing plant to make the plates to print the books or the periodicals. I learnt that technique from Stewart, and he also let me borrow the composer to produce Domebook One in 1970. In 1971, we produced Domebook 2 and, bingo, I was a publisher. We ended up printing 160,000 copies of that book, and by that time we had distribution by Random House in New York. The book sold like crazy, and so I’ve been a publisher ever since. But it all started with the Whole Earth Catalog.

That’s an incredible story. The Whole Earth Catalog is often referred to as an analog precursor to the Internet. How do you view the legacy of his emphasis on open access? What you think we can learn from this example of resource sharing?

The Whole Earth Catalog had no advertising. The reviews were written by people like me, a network of thousands of people who wrote on all kinds of things. It became really popular. During a speech at a Stanford graduation ceremony, Steve Jobs called the Catalog ‘…one of the bibles of my generation,’ and described it as ‘…Google in paperback form.’

Domebook 2 sold over 100,000 copies.That’s an astronomical print run that most publishers today wouldn’t dream of.

Yes. Domebook One sold only 5000 copies. Domebook 2 , 160,000 copies.

Wow, that’s unbelievable. Nonetheless, you took this bestseller out of print. What’s the story behind that? 

Well, to tell the truth, I took some mescaline one day, and I had been having my doubts about domes. I’d had a beautiful day walking up a creek, and as I was walking back down, I saw a beautiful meadow. I thought — due to my enhanced consciousness — ‘What if there was a dome in that meadow, and it was falling apart, and it was plastic, and it was my fault because I told people how to build domes?’ When I got back home, I called my agent at Random House, and said, ‘Don, I’m taking Domebook 2 out of print’. He said, ‘Are you crazy? It’s still selling really well,” and I said, ‘I don’t want any more domes on my karma.’

One important thing I learnt in this process is that when you admit you’re wrong in front of that many people, it’s kind of cathartic. Here’s what I thought a couple of months ago, but I changed my mind, and this is what I think now. From that point on, I wasn’t afraid to say that I was wrong. So many people spend so much time trying to justify their positions no matter if the world is tumbling down around them. It’s tragic. Shelter opened up a whole other horizon for me. It was about all the different ways that people build all over the world. 

Shelter is also the book that introduced me to you almost 50 years after it was originally published. How did that book come about?

After spending so much time telling people about domes, I felt an obligation to show a whole world of building techniques and materials that made much more sense. I travelled throughout the United States, Canada, and England for a year or two, photographing and studying all these other ways to build. England in particular was very formative for me in discovering how building started out, how early buildings were circular and then became rectangular with agriculture, and for generally tracing the development of shapes and materials. I was discovering all these other ways of building, from timber framing to building with bamboo or dirt or adobe, with a sense of awe. And then we made it all into a book. My partner who designed the book, Bob Easton, was an architect. I got Bob and his wife, Jeanine, to come live in Bolinas for three months, and we put Shelter together that summer. 

To what do you attribute Shelter’s enduring success over half a century later?

Shelter shows people doing things for themselves. Using their hands. At the center of the book — literally at the heart of it —Bob Easton drew plans for five different tiny homes. That was about four decades before the tiny house movement.

What have been your touch points with architects and the discipline of architecture at large?

I don’t believe many architects appreciate my work. I don’t know if they understand what I’m doing. They seem to have their own territory to defend, and I don’t have academic credentials. That’s just the way it is. 

Yet, during your — let’s call it your ‘Dome Period’— you were deeply inspired by Buckminster Fuller. You went to see him talk, and I also remember an old picture of you at an architecture conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) back in the ’70s. So there were obviously some connection points between you and Architecture with a capital ‘A.’

That MIT conference was in 1972, and it was called Responsive Housebuilding Technologies. I was invited as the editor of the Domebook 2, but by the time I went there I had given up on domes. A lot of people were angry with me for that. There were a lot of people who still favoured plastic and high-tech building materials, and I’d had bad experiences with these materials for building, and I got into an argument with people there. This also happened at a big building conference in Los Angeles in the late ’60s or early ’70s. It was called Shelter for Mankind. Buckminster Fuller and Paolo Soleri were featured speakers, and I was invited to do a presentation on building. 

Fuller, Soleri, you. That’s a big stage, Lloyd!

I gave a lecture on my work in a room mostly full of dome enthusiasts. The first slide I showed was a thatched cottage in a field in Ireland, and I asked them, ‘Why does this building look so good here?’ I said, ‘It’s because they gathered the stones from the field. They built the walls of the house with those stones. They harvested barley from the field, and then used the stalks for a thatched roof. This house looks perfect because it’s built from local materials. Everything blends into the environment. A dome is completely different. You’re coming to a building site with the same exact design. You’re bringing in materials that are often plastic.’

People practically booed me off the stage because I had given up on domes. Very similar to what happened at MIT. Also, I discovered a weird relationship between industry, military, and the university. People at MIT were designing air buildings out of vinyl with a grant from the Army because the Army wanted to figure out a way to make a bridge across the Mekong River that they could use in the Vietnam War. I was shocked to see that. After these experiences I had a rather dim view of academia. 

I feel like people are coming to understand your approach more and more now. The fact that Leopold and I — who were not even born when you did all this — reached out to you is already telling. What do you want to be most known for? 

Oh, I don’t have any desire to be known. I mean, I like the fact that these books have been discovered by people and that they have been inspirational. What I’m most proud of is that these books have caused people to change their lives. 

Do you have any new books up your sleeve?

The book that people seem to want me to do now is going to be called Learning to Build, and it will cover a lot of the stuff that we talked about today. It’s about how novices or new builders can actually build their own homes. 

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learnt about yourself by living in a somewhat self-sufficient or independent way? 

I don’t think in terms of it being surprising, but one important thing I’ve learnt is that you can’t be self-sufficient. You can’t come close to being totally self-sufficient. At our peak, we were maybe supplying 15 to 20 percent of our own food. That’s when we had goats and bees and chickens, none of which I have any more. So, I tell people that self-sufficiency is like perfection. Perfection is a direction. You never get there. Nothing is ever totally perfect. But the important thing is to aim for it.