About CountryPlans

Most important person I ever met: One of the reasons I've never gotten registered as an architect (registration involves taking a long state exam) is because I've never met one I'd trade places with. I always thought one would come along who would inspire me to "get the professional label". It never happened. Ken Kern was the architect I learned the most from, but then Ken never got registered either. Perhaps we share this disregard for state sanctioned credentials.

After he got out of architecture school, Kern traveled around the world documenting the house building techniques of indigenous peoples. He learned many low-tech ways to get the most out of simple building materials and later incorporated these ideas into his many books. I went down to see him after I was inspired by his first self-published book, "The Owner Built Home". I stayed on and ended up working with him for almost two years.

During the time we were together, we built many experimental projects and ended up designing perhaps 100 owner-built homes. Ken had a mail order custom home design service. These projects ranged from a house for a couple in Arkansas with $500, an axe and a chain saw (we designed a shingle-sided teepee), to a Unitarian minister in Vermont who wanted to grow orchids (he got a stone house with a two story solarium).

Ken was always experimenting with new and better ways of building. A stone mason at heart, he often pushed concrete and rock to its structural limits. He's gone now. He died when a concrete slip form dome house collapsed during a freak wind storm. He had just finished it and wanted to spend the first night in the new structure. 

It's not such a bad way to go -fully engaged with life and going down with your current project.

Thanks Ken, you taught me how to do more with less, and how to not get caught up in the architectural ego-trap of over-designed style.

Most interesting job I ever had: For several years I lived on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Mt. Haleakala is an extinct volcano at the center of the island. At 10,000 feet on the rim of the crater is a white dome run by the University of Hawaii. It 's a solar observatory, and for two years I ran telescopes and tracked the sun from there looking for sunspots and solar flares. I would drive up a winding mountain road early each morning to be on top as the sun came up out of the ocean. All day I'd study the sun's mood and take photos.

This was where I learned the nature and power of the sun and fell in love with clear air and high elevations.

What I learned from school: Architecture school was a mixed bag. I was never really comfortable with the modern definition of an architect.

The term, the profession, and the educational system to train architects was defined by concepts developed in the Beaux Arts school of 18th and 19th century France. The Beaux Arts school was an academic art school where the idea of the architect as a cultural and intellectual artist of space was first separated off from the earlier concept of the master builder. Most of our great historic buildings where not designed by architects, but by master builders. (There were no architects, in the modern sense, before about 1850.)

Master builders knew the skills of construction intimately and worked with them daily to evolve their designs for the cathedrals, castles and the other great buildings we now consider the cornerstones of architecture. Not considering themselves to be intellectual artists, they didn't hold themselves separate from the work and didn't fall so easily into the ego traps of style, prestige and personal glory. Because of this, most go unnamed by history. Master builders experienced their buildings as evolving interactive creations of material and spirit. Many modern architects seem to have forgotten that buildings are anything more than an intellectual exercises in abstract esthetics and engineering.

I personally find myself more comfortable with the master builder concept than the French idea of the architect as an intellectual tastemaker of buildings.