Shelter and beyond

The publishing legacy of Llkoyd Khan.

4 min readApr 24, 2019

The books that influenced a generation, and that still do.

WHEN WAS IT I stumbled across Shelter? Long ago, that’s for sure. I would put it around the early seventies when my partner of the time and I had this idea of finding a patch of land in the country, not far from Hobart. That didn’t happen but Shelter did and it attained a prominence rare in publishing. It is still in print.

Shelter was one of the books which launched the publishing career of Lloyd Khan. Lloyd is one of those remarkable characters who came out of 60s/70s alternative culture.

He got into building at that time and edited a segment in the Whole Earth Catalog. The Catalog has been described as ‘the internet before the internet’. It was a compendium of tools, ideas and literature produced for the ‘back to the land’ or ‘alternative’ movement of the time. In the US and Australia, that movement drew tens of thousands of mainly young people out of the cities to the new land-sharing settlements and to old farmhouse in the country. Some are still there.

The Catalog included what we today call ‘user-generated content’, material written by its readers. It was also a networking tool linking readers in city and country. It carried news and ideas and formed the intellectual glue of a geographically distributed social movement united by a desire to go out and build a better way of living. It was a book that stimulated the transformation of the intellectual into the practical. It was a suitable place for Lloyn Khan to start his publishing career because it created his core readership at the time.

Let me say a word about Shelter, for, like the Catalog, it too is one of those seminal books that inspired and turned readers in new life directions. With its copious photographs and descriptive text, the book inspired many to go out and build.

Still in print, the book went through a number of editions. That’s durability, but it’s more than that. It is a documentation of social and building history, a recording of the aspirations of a generation, an artefact of its time that is still relevant. The images show owner-built architecture as it then was, yet the fact that the book is still in demand demonstrates that it offered more than appeared on its pages. What to offered, and what it still offers, is an unstated understanding that another way of life is possible.

The truth of that is attested to on Lloyd’s blog where he documents his architectural finds and his travels to speak about his new books at bookshops and other venues, as well as the things he encounters. It is not unusual on those travels, particularly when visiting some artful owner-built home, for people to bring out their original copies of Shelter with covers rumpled and pages creased and loose from the binding. They are treasured possessions because they were the inspiration for what those people did.

Lloyd is an active eighty-plus year old living on a small homestead in California. A surfer, and in his seventies a skateboarder, Lloyd founded Shelter Publications at the time he published Shelter. He didn’t stop there. Shelter 2 appeared soon after and over the years that has been followed by Builders of the Pacific Coast; Home Work — Handbuilt Shelter; Tiny Homes — Simple Shelter; Small Homes: The Right Size; Tiny Homes on the Move, a book about tiny homes for mobile living on land and sea, and his most recent book, Driftwood Shacks: Anonymous Architecture Along the California Coast.

It is no accident this fuzzy-haired man has such a following. His contribution has been to document the work of others and his own experience so that we all may learn, so that we may all be inspired. Eagerly, I await some new title to appear bearing the name of Llauthor — Lloyd Khan.

Books on building by Lloyd Kahn

Domebook One (1970)
Domebook 2 (1971)
Shelter (editor, 1973)
Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter (author, 2004)
Builders of the Pacific Coast (author, 2008)
Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter (author, 2012)
Tiny Homes on the Move (author, 2014)
Small Homes: The Right Size (2017)
Driftwood Shacks: Anonymous Architecture Along the California Coast (2018).

Lloyd Khan’s blog
Lloyd Khan on Facebook
Lloyd Khan’s Wikipedia entry
Shelter blog
Shelter Publications

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