Built by Hand

As books go this one makes it to my top ten. People are always using the word venacular out of context, this book puts it right back. The pictures in this book speak a thousand words. Use whats local, works with materials found around you. I live on an Island on the West coast, lots of rain. There are so many people on this Island building 'green houses' with straw bales. There are so many people who are going to have mouldy homes!!! Venacular learn the word. Live in a home made of the materials around you! Buy this book, and learn.

Without qualification, this is the greatest account of vernacular architecture, indigenous shelter, and traditional folk-built home images ever published. And it won't likely be surpassed, since fanatical photographer Yoshio Komatsu spent 25 years travelling the globe to document the full jaw-dropping variety of shelter on earth. He's been EVERYWHERE. I can't think of a remote region of Asia, Africa, South American and Europe that he missed; most of the styles are new and stimulating to me, and I've been around. While the classic small tome of Architecture Without Architects hints dreamily at this diversity, Built By Hand completes the thought by explicitly celebrating this abundance in vivid in-your-face technicolor. It's in a different league from all previous vernacular architecture books. This one is a stupendous 480-page cornucopic tome overflowing with 700 photographs, and thousands of details, hopes, and design ideas. Totally breathtaking, totally awesome! If this doesn't get you to grab a hammer, nothing will.

There has never been a photographer of buildings like Yoshio Komatsu. He's been shooting photos around the world for 25 years now and this stunning book is the result. It's a spectacular photo journey, like a film, around the planet, giving you rare glimpses of shelter in every corner of the earth. The photos are absolutely wonderful. Text and editing are by straw bale gurus Bill and Athena Steen, and Eiko Komatsu. This is like an updated, expanded, technicolor, improved-upon Architecture Without Architects. Wow!

I perused this book in a bookstore and just purchased my own copy. It is FILLED with gorgeous, detailed photographs that show not only the buildings themselves, but include human life and show how people interact with their architecture. I feel that it is a mind-opening book because it makes one realize how much this vernacular, "primative"-like architecture is still used and useful, around the world. I am an architecture student and hope that other young architects look to books like this for inspiration. I think that this book is the next "Architecture Without Architects" (another thoughtful architect's must-have, by Bernard Rudolfsky), and one of the best to emerge in the last several decades. I congratulate the authors and photographers for their work!