Shelter: 40th Anniversary Edition

Read the definitive, complete guide to shelters—more than 300,000 copies sold!

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, Shelter 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.