Shelter - 40th Anniversary Edition

by Lloyd Kahn and Bob Easton

Shelter is so amazing, so revolutionary, that the best way to describe it is with one word: everything! It’s a history of architecture, a do-it-yourself (DIY) guide, a scrapbook, and a collection of essays and stories. If you’ve ever wondered about any aspect of houses, homes, or other simple structures in which people have lived, this is the book for you.

First published in 1973, remains a source of inspiration and invention. Including the nuts-and-bolts aspects of building, the book covers such topics as dwellings, from Iron Age huts to Bedouin tents to Togo's tin-and-thatch houses; nomadic shelters, from tipis to “housecars;” and domes; dome cities; sod iglus; and even treehouses.

Authors Lloyd Kahn and Bob Easton recount personal stories about alternative dwellings that demonstrate sensible solutions to problems associated with using materials found in the environment—with fascinating, often surprising results.

Shelter is many things:

• a visually dynamic, oversized compendium of organic architecture, past and present;
• a how-to book that includes more than 1,250 illustrations;
• and a Whole Earth Catalog type of sourcebook for living in harmony with the earth by using every conceivable material.

Shelter Publications / 2nd edition, 2000, softcover, 11 x 14.5 inches, 176 pages.

Lloyd Kahn is an American publisher, editor, author, photographer, carpenter, and self-taught architect. He is the founding editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications, Inc., and is the former Shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He is a pioneer of the green building and green architecture movements. His book Shelter, 1973, about DIY architecture, has sold more than 250,000 copies. He lives and works in Bolinas, Marin County, California.

Bob Easton is an architect and has co-authored and designed the books, Domebook One and Two, Shelter, Shelter II, the Whole Earth Catalog, and Native American Architecture with Peter Nabokov. He was also pivotal, along with Lloyd Kahn, in the birth of West Coast (California) publishing. He lives and works in Montecito, California.