Matt Holton and Cristina Pineda were living on Maui where the average home price is a million dollars when they heard about lots on the Big Island selling for about 20K. They bought an acre for 22K, and with no building experience, soon began to build their own home. Near the rim of the Kīlauea…
Bio-architect Alosha Lynov has experienced his own Tolstoyan Odyssey: interested in natural building, he taught himself to design and build shelters with materials and shapes inspired by Nature that resemble an Arctic version of Antoni Gaudí’s designs. Alosha pushes his version of eco-construction to the limits so his “buriable” shelters “can handle the harshest and…
An Austin couple wanted to add on to their two-bedroom bungalow, but they didn’t want to move out and they didn’t want to use backyard space, so architect Nicole Blair decided to attach an ADU (accessory dwelling unit) to their roof. The steel structure was prefabbed off-site, and in less than 24 hours, it was…
Al Schwarz wanted a home with low energy bills and protection from extreme weather so he dug into a hillside, inserted cement domes and buried them again with enough earth and rock to guarantee protection. He spent 10 years stacking 230 tons of rock as a retaining wall and planting grass and trees atop the…
Sam Ciccarelli and Rosie Dooley live in a kaleidoscopic attic home that is a maze of triangles, tunneled bedrooms and expansive skylights that have inspired them to launch a one-of-a-kind pizza venture. The couple, who met while working at the famed Chez Panisse, sell wild-fermented pizzas cooked in a 2,000-pound, igloo-shaped oven bolted to the…
Ken Haggard and Polly Cooper have built natural homes with passive solar techniques and powered by renewables since the seventies, so when in August 1994 a wildfire destroyed their property and home, they decided to rebuild them back, only better. They used fire-resistive strawbale walls for their new studio and home, built next to the…
In Paradise Valley (Montana) there are 52 underground bunkers, capable of housing hundreds of people. They were built in the 1980s to prepare for nuclear fallout. When Dean Anderson found one for sale by owner, he snapped it up for a good price since it was filled with 45,000 pounds of dried food. “Basically to…
Wendy Green had spent most of her life in suburban New Jersey long days as a yoga teacher so when she turned 50, she sold her house and used the proceeds to buy remote land in the Andes. There she built an all-wood, tall and narrow, home, installed solar, a gravity-fed water system and planted…
Neil Decker and Stella Michaels both suffered from chemical sensitivities so they spent 6 years building their home of only natural materials. They used hempcrete (hemp hurds, lime and sand) as their walls, plastered in lime (exterior) and clay (interior), with earthen cob floors. The couple didn’t think they could afford to live in California,…
Remote work and high prices have hollowed out part of the activity of vibrant city centers, and Manhattan is a symbol of such phenomenon. But the shift didn’t translate into cheaper living and rents remain prohibitive. The long-lasting reality of micro-apartments in New York shows that the need for entry-level housing has remained high over…
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