In 1972, when I finally gave up on domes (as homes), I decided to study real building. Over a quarter of a million people had read Domebook 2, believing — as I did at one time — that domes were a new and improved method of building homes.
Wrong! For details, see: https://www.shelterpub.com/domes.
With two cameras (a Nikon and a Nikkormat) — loaded with Kodacolor slides and Tri-X black and white film — I travelled across the United States, then Canada, and then to Ireland and England, where I found a treasure trove of information on building: homes, barns, farm buildings, churches. Traditional.
In my previous life as an insurance broker (1960-’65), one of my clients was the Irish-American Club of San Francisco and they had 30-day charter flights to Ireland for $200 round trip. I took my 12-year-old son Peter with me on the first trip.
All of the drawings and paintings here are from Old English Country Cottages - Special Winter Number of the Studio - 1906-7. The pen and ink drawings are by Sidney R. Jones.
We got off the plane in Shannon and started hitchhiking. We took a ferry across the Irish Sea and continued hitchhiking. Our destination: Mapledurham, a small English village on the Thames river near Reading, where my friends, the Geraghty brothers, had rented the two-story miller’s house in the village.
In Derbyshire or Lancashire, we got a ride with a salesman heading south. When he learned that I was interested in building, he started pointing things out.
“You see that farmhouse? It blends in with the landscape because it’s built with local materials — bricks made with local soil and slate for the roof from nearby quarries.”
As we travelled on, he’d point out buildings made with locally-available materials, all blending in with their surroundings. Also that designs came from local conditions. Designers (often farmers) and builders took into account wind and rainfall patterns, site orientation, climate, and this knowledge was passed along to future-generation builders. A far cry from domes, all based on the same geometric mathematics and the same materials, plopped down anywhere.
In London, I hooked up with people at the Architectural Association, a wonderful multi-disciplinary college of architecture. My favorite contact there was Richard Harris, who had published a great little book, with black and white drawings, titled Discovering Timber Frame Buildings.
Richard and I shared a love of traditional British building techniques and materials. He went on the become the director of the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in Singleton, West Sussex, one of the world’s finest museums of traditional building.
Another friend I made at the AA was Robin Middleton, the school’s librarian, who one day took me across Bedford Square to Weinreb Books, a hidden-away architectural bookstore. Every time I ‘d come to London, I’d go to Weinrebs and buy books, including the one shown here.
Mapledurham, where we stayed with our friends when we were not in London, was a real English village, with the manor house, alms houses, water-driven mill, miller’s house, church, graveyard and town square — surrounded by fields planted in barley and wheat. The village was somewhat run down, with half of the buildings unoccupied,. This was in early ‘70s and the village had not yet been “discovered.” It was a great place to hang out while I studied traditional building practices.
Fifty years ago, gathering material for Shelter, traditional building seemed perhaps more relevant than it does today. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, we had TIME to utilize traditional building techniques, and building materials were magnitudes less expensive than they are now.
So I don’t know how much immediate relevance building techniques of the past have for today’s home builders, but I still cherish the beauty of timber framing, materials dictated by local conditions, and techniques honed by experience and practicality.
Interesting as always, Lloyd. It takes courage to acknowledge that old vernaculars are as futuristic as one could think of, if by futuristic we understand timeless, locally built, repairable, patina-friendly, durable, etc.
Lloyd! My partner and I live in a converted 19th century arts and crafts cottage in England on a hilltop where one the original English Diggers settlements (inspired by Gerrard Winstanley) in the countryside was in 1650, come visit us anytime! x