Saturday, November 22, 2008

Sauna in progress




Almost completed 3 story, Dug in Sauna.
Wood stove fired


Photo Credit: Stephen Hren

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Friday, June 27, 2008

10 structure ideas


A Few b-Home Structures

1. “Lower case a frame house”: The almost spherical structure’s shape will emulated a lower case letter a, continuing the A-frame house tradition. Viewers observing the house from the other side, will encounter a lower case B for “b-Home”.

2. The “Well House”: Also called the Well, Well, Welles House, this structure will house the working hand pump that will supply b-home with potable water. The Well House’s main skeleton with be made of 3 over sized W’s. Inside the Well House will be a library focusing on three men: H.G. Wells, George Orwell, and Orson Welles.

3. The "T- house" -small house shaped like the letter T which would be used for
-Japanese tea ceremonies
-Final resting spot for your favorite old T-shirts
-Homage to the HQ of DC comics Teen Titans, which was shaped like a T
-In Aldous Huxley’s book Brave New world, a giant T building the messianic figure:Henry Ford’s Model T, and “Oh lord” in the book was exchanged with “Oh Ford”
-a tribute to other "T" buildings: El Lissitzy's, Marcos Acayaba's, and Simon Ungers and Thomas Kinslow's

4. The "Old News" House (also called the Junk Mail House). A conical styled dome structure that uses recycled bundles of newspapers, magazines, and junk mail as building material. The technique would emulate the Adobe brick style in which the exterior would be properly treated with plaster and lime to withstand the elements. This houses motto will be “old news is good news” or “read it and reap”.

5. “Tree Glove Story House” is a structure which takes discarded Christmas trees and uses the Native American Indian building structure, the Kick-a-poo Wigwam as a template. This structure would house a lost-and-found repository for gloves and a museum for all things Glove related. The outer skin of the house would be made of hundreds of gloves donated from the once largest manufacturing of gloves in the world in Upstate New York, Gloversville.

6. “The Crate House” - Various Art Crating Companies would sponsor the creation of Small Structures which would mainly use recycled art crates as their main building block. These heavy duty wooden boxes are made to transport priceless art safely around the world and then upon return ,broken up, thrown in dumpsters and sent off to the land fill. This Structure may come closest to the Le Corbusier ,modernist house.

7. Big Rock Candy Platforms - There are a few big rocks(10’x6’x8’) on a slope that lie on the b-Home grounds which will have level platforms with roofs installed on top of them.As the earth slowly moves the Boulder over the years due to frost heave, the level-ness of the platform will be closely documented.The large grape vines which at the present time grow on the rock will be trellised for extra shade and eventually used .

8.The Greene House- A working Green House which would pay tribute to the county in which b-Home is located along with giving homage and incorporating other Architects with the last name "Greene"...
-David Greene( from Archigram)
-Herb Greene
-Greene and Greene
A main feature of the Greene House will be insulated panels which consist of clear plastic ”trash”(2 liter bottles, packing and wrapping material etc.) sandwiched between 2 pieces of donated plexiglas from picture framer’s cut offs.

9. Super Th attached-Skin-Creature House - partly an ode to the recently closed Catskill Game Farm and to LUCY the Margate N.J. elephant along with incorporating other "Roadside Animal Architecture" which lies along the Dusty roads of the American highways. These Zoomorphic architectural styles have long been influencing such contemporary architects such as Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Grimshaw

10. The Knot house(also called the Bonsai Mausoleum) Another Discarded building block are the knots and abnormalities from the locally milled trees. With these donated hunks of wood a small structure will be built that would house a collection of fail Bonsai tree’s.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

(Still #2) East Coast Unit





Allison Wiese

(Still #2) East Coast Unit
Shed, hot water heater, plumbing fixtures, hoses
2003-Present

Tornado damage





The Chainsaw

Friday, June 6, 2008


Digging for the cordwood sauna has started

Friday, May 30, 2008




The newest structural additions to b-home.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Cabin photos




Here are a couple updated images of the cabin.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Flying squirrel in residence




I started cutting some board in the ceiling and the saw made a squeeking noise against the wood and out came three baby squirrels, must not of like the sound.,
Mother said "no!" "come back here you"
and came down to retrieve them. She fell around the cabin alittle picking them up, and then decided to move out. Good decision since Kitty is moving in in a week.
Patrick Ohare, stopped by that day and saw the mother too.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Thursday, March 27, 2008

12 more structure ideas

12 more-
1.House of Cards
2. Dresser House
3.The Field House
4.The Ice House
5.House of Saud
6.Habachi-Hirachi House
7.The Tape House
8.The Big House
9.Pagoda imploda
10. The O House
11 . House Of Commons
12.The Bow House



Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Architectural cribbage rules



Architectural Cribbage is a pastime that provides social opportunities to display true craftsmanship and respect for the environment, without rancor, animosity, or overwhelming self-interest during competition.

In view of these goals, the following are considered to be some of the unacceptable practices and are grounds for suspension or expulsion from the game of architectural cribbage:

* Marking or deforming shelters for vanity sake or manipulative purposes
* Controlling the location of the materials in the pile before dividing them up equally

* Secreting materials for later retrieval, including surreptitiously dropping stuff off before official pick up begins

* Changing or altering another structure with out permission

* Intentionally building poorly for the purpose of enhancing the record of an opponent

* Actions or conversation unbecoming a member of architectural cribbage (drunkenness, abusive language, etc.)

* Initiating a violation of rules for the purpose of gaining an advantage, whether actually gained or not, even though the rules specify a penalty for the violation

* Actions detrimental to the objectives of architectural cribbage



By honoring all rules, a player will have guidelines for a good creation and fair play, resulting in an enjoyable experience for all participants.

***************************************************

Saturday, March 1, 2008

The Only building LeCorbusier built himself a 12x12ftcabin



Le Corbusier’s Cabanon, Roquebrune-Cap Martin, Côte d’Azur, France



Written by Jonathan Duff, Twentieth Century Society Member living in Brussels

Images courtesy Emmanuelle Morgan




Down a quiet, leafy footpath in the Côte d’Azur hides perhaps the most modest piece of interesting architecture of any historical period and yet it was designed by one of the twentieth century’s most influential and least modest architects.

The Swiss born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, or Le Corbusier as he preferred to be called, was a frequent visitor to Eileen Gray’s and Jean Badovici’s nearby Villa E-1027 which Gray had designed over 30 years before. He fell out with her after he got up early one morning and painted an unwanted mural in her house. An ‘act of violation’ as she described it.

Le Corbusier had become friends with another neighbour, Thomas Rebutato, a former plumber who owned and ran a small café cum inn next door, L’Etoile de Mer. It was whilst the two were planning the redevelopment of the site, with the intention of building Unités de camping, that Corbu persuaded Rebutato to give him a sliver of adjoining land on which to build a cabanon or small hut. He built it as a model in minimal habitation and as a birthday present for his wife, Yvonne.

Designed in December 1951 in less than an hour, building work lasted only six months and it was completed in August 1952 using rough pine boards for the exterior and plywood and oak pieces for the interior, mostly prefabricated in Corsica. The initial idea was to have used aluminium cladding which would have had a completely different, if not incongruous effect.

The surface area is about 16m2. There is no kitchen: the couple took all their meals, including breakfast, at the café, to which a door in the small entrance corridor provides direct access. There is no door to the WC and the bidet abuts the headrest of one of the beds: Yvonne covered it with a cloth. "Not a square centimetre wasted! A little cell at human scale where all functions were considered" as Le Corbusier described his smallest ‘machine for living in’.

He devoted much thought to the interior detailing, using vivid red, green and blue panels on the ceiling to contrast with the yellow-painted floor and wooden warmth of the walls. The ceiling is low to allow for ample storage. He painted a colourful mural along the entrance passage. The little furniture there is is made of recycled materials: crates for stools; railway carriage reading lights; porte-abus for a lamp and so on.

At the time Le Corbusier had made two long trips to India and it is possible that he was influenced by Hinduism and Sannyasa, the notion of a life of renouncement and poverty. Certainly the cabanon expresses the simplicity, truth and freedom of the individual. He made precise plans of Punjabi houses and appeared as interested in their building techniques and way of housing as he was in their architectural forms. He used these plans to design the Peon houses, simple structures that were to have been sited behind the Governor’s palace in Chandigarh.

The layout is conceived more from the interior than with regard to connecting to its immediate surrounds and yet this makes perfect sense. There are only two windows, which are small, but the shutters fold back inside to reveal mirrors that reflect the turquoise sea and, framed by pine and palm trees, the other not-so-modest machines for living in across the bay in Monte Carlo.

Although the cabanon has virtually all one needs to pass a non self-catering holiday, Le Corbusier also built an even tinier hut a few metres away for an atelier to work in, the shade of a large Carob tree linking the two.

Thirteen years after completing it, he drowned off the coast, during a long swim. This may have been an act of suicide, his wife having died in 1957. "How nice it would be to die swimming towards the sun", he once remarked to a colleague. He also designed an austere but elegant and, of course functional, concrete tomb for Yvonne and himself and it sits in the Vieux Cimetière at the top of the old town.

Gary Panter- The Human Scale Bower Bird creation


Gary Panter suggested this one...

From Wiki-pedia:
The most notable characteristic of bowerbirds is the extraordinarily complex behaviour of males, which is to build a bower to attract mates. Depending on the species, the bower ranges from a circle of cleared earth with a small pile of twigs in the center to a complex and highly decorated structure of sticks and leaves — usually shaped like a walkway, a small hut or a maypole — into and around which the male places a variety of objects he has collected. These objects — usually strikingly blue in hue — may include hundreds of shells, leaves, flowers, feathers, stones, berries, and even discarded plastic items or pieces of glass. The bird spends hours carefully sorting and arranging his collection, with each object in a specific place; if an object is moved while the bowerbird is away he will put it back in its place. No two bowers are the same, and the collection of objects reflects the personal taste of each bird and its ability to procure unusual and rare items (going as far as stealing them from neighboring bowers). At mating time, the female will go from bower to bower, watching as the male owner conducts an often elaborate mating ritual and inspecting the quality of the bower. Many females end up selecting the same male, and many underperforming males are left without mates.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008