In 1973 Art Boericke and Barry Shapiro published Handmade Houses: A Guide to the Woodbutcher's Art, and the following year, no doubt inspired by that book, Robert Haney, David Ballantine, and Jonathan Elliott also published a similar book called Woodstock Handmade Houses. In them these books covered a collection of homes that were built by people dissatisfied with cookie cutter homes, subdivisions and McMansions, and took things in their own hands by building homes more suited for the environment, not to mention using any kind of scrap material they could get a hold of. These books were very basic, and they even kept the location of these homes and their builders/owners anonymous (especially to keeping away unwanted attention from building inspectors and perhaps curiosity seekers).
As a small kid, from 1976 to 1978 me and my family lived in a handmade house in Oregon. It didn't have the creativity or imagination as those featured on those books, on the other hand, I'm so glad I lived in such a home. It was a bit more basic, it did not have fancy stained glass windows or unusual arches, it looked more like those houses you'd see in those Foxfire books from the 1970s. It was on a couple of acres, with a meadow going up a hill, plus a garden. The main road was up a hill, and at that time, there were no neighbors in view (today, the house is gone, looked like the lots were subdivided, with now a McMansion, and several mainstream houses in the area, these days it wouldn't be the place I want to live). A hippie commune called Butler Green was about a quarter of a mile away (Butler Green went defunct in 1979 after a police raid). So it felt like hippie heaven to me, hard to believe how different it was like when cell phones, the Internet, HDTV, DVD, Blu-Ray, iPods, Nintento Wii, and them did not exist, and that VCRs were in their infancy and way too expensive for most people to afford, remote control television was still rare, home computers were starting to hit the market (Apple II, PET, TRS-80), and I didn't even know about technology like that then. Living out there it seemed like a cross between the 1870s (a home like that could have been easily made then, minus the electricity, as this home had electric, although heated by a wood stove), the 1960s (the hippie vibe, and the fact my dad owned a 1950s-era VW Microbus minus the Grateful Dead stickers), and the 1970s (turn on the Eugene rock station like KZEL and the only way to tell it was the 1970s was the station was playing Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, and KISS). Sadly in late 1978, the owners were wanting to sell the property, and our family had to move back into the city, into an apartment, and it was really hard for me to adjust after two years of living in the country. It seemed more mainstream, our family even now had a television where I watched Battlestar Galactica, Six Million Dollar Man, and the Bionic Woman, plus Saturday morning cartoons (which was then mainly Bugs Bunny, Scooby Doo, and the Superfriends, sometimes Land of the Lost).
I wanted a much more updated book on the subject of handmade houses, and in 2012 Richard Olsen delivered with Handmade Houses: A Century of Earth-Friendly Home Design. If you own A Guide to the Woodbutcher's Art and Woodstock Handmade Houses, this is a must! Not only do you get handmade houses that were made in the United States, but also Canada, Britain, France, Italy and Australia. Much greater detail is included about the history of these homes and the builders. You'll even notice reference to many other books, not just the two Handmade Houses books from the 1970s, but others like The Craftsman Builder (also by Art Boericke and Barry Shapiro), Craftsmen of Necessity by Christopher Williams, They Chose to Be Different by Chuck Crandall, amongst others (I plan on trying to get these books, used, naturally, as most, if not all, are out of print). You'll discover some of them were built before the hippie-era, some built in the 1950s and even before, You'll learn this was going on much longer than the 1960s, but it was only the emergence of the hippie movement in the 1960s that many more were taking up to this kind of home design. I really enjoy how far removed from cookie cutter subdivision houses and McMansion these homes are. I'm glad I got to live in a home like it, even if it didn't didn't have the imagination of those homes. Occasionally I noticed a home featured in Olsen's book that I seen in A Guide to the Woodbutcher's Art, and surprisingly they look very much the same in 2012 as they did in 1973!
This book just amazes me, maybe in the future I'll end up living in a handmade house again.
- Hardcover: 240 pages
- Publisher: Rizzoli; 1st edition (March 20, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0847838455
- ISBN-13: 978-0847838455
- Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 1.1 x 9.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
- Customer Reviews: 55 customer reviews
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#865,380 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #306 in Architectural Materials
- #1009 in Architectural Drafting & Presentation
- #372 in Sustainability & Green Design
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