Today we spent the afternoon diving down and ripping out water lily roots from the muddy bottom, because even though the lilies are beautiful, they’re an introduced species and they’re filling the lake. It’s hard and slightly creepy work, but the wine afterward makes up for it. You actually need the wine after fumbling around with weird, stubborn roots in the murky, existential depths. Photos are of my favourite handmade house, situated on a warm Vancouver Island lake, August 2009.

If tumblr is a bellwether – and it may not be but it’s fun to speculate – then the sixties & seventies are back. In style, if not in substance. So many of tumblr’s weird little blogs, each of them a kind of eclectic personal bulletin board, feature this kind of rock and roll Hair: The Musical meets back-to-the-land handmade-house thing. More than a bulletin board, actually, since each one also exists as a sort of complete photo essay and a sustained non-verbal argument. In this case it’s an argument for a simpler yet groovier style of living, and you get a feeling there may actually be a politics behind the aesthetics. Thanks to the way tumblr makes it simple to re-post an image from someone else’s tumblr blog in your own tumblr stream, while providing you with a link back to theirs, each tumblr collection instantly leads you on to many others with a similar world view. I’m not sure how I first came upon cosmic_dust, possibly it was here, but it led to alaskaneyes and self_romance which led to endless numbers of strange little worlds. These images are a tiny sample from the superb cosmic_dust.

When we’ve seen too much shiny design and when we’re finding citified houses too chichi, too finishy, too much at a remove from the cabin, we find ourselves looking at pictures of handbuilt houses. People may dismiss these as “hippie houses,” but the evident Japanese, Scandinavian and other architectural influences actually ally these places with a certain strand of modernism. This bedroom’s use of textiles, the wool blanket on the patterned bedspread, the coarse but pleasing textures, the architecturally bold beams and trusses, the skylight and the generally abundant light, the sense that the trees outside are part of the room – maybe it’s because we both had contact with people who lived in houses like this when we were growing up, but this room is beautiful. Maybe not to everyone, but for us… well, you can almost smell the perfume of the wood in that room. This photo is from a great book from 1972 titled Handmade Houses. There are two relatively new books on handbuilt houses by Lloyd Kahn, who has probably  documented more of these Pacific coast houses than anyone, and we’re periodically going to feature what we think are the most interesting of these buildings.

Maybe it’s because these houses are reminiscent of the tradition of handmade houses here on the West Coast, but there’s something pleasingly familiar about the eccentric wooden buildings of Christiana, the surreal, semi-autonomous, rebel neighbourhood of Copenhagen. It would take too long to fully cover the strange history of  Christiania here, but you can click the link to read the Wikipedia entry if you’re not familiar with the story. In short, Christiania began in 1971 as an occupation of disused army barracks in the south of the city and has continued for over 30 years as a sort of utopian social experiment. Some interesting articles on Christiania’s present so-called demise are here and here and here. It’s the houses themselves I’m interested in. In British Columbia, this form of wild, freeform architecture is commonly called the handmade or hippie house, but we’ve also heard the term Westcoast Vernacular used to describe this style, and in California it’s sometimes called Big Sur Vernacular. You can actually find houses like these still nestled in parts of Vancouver, though they’re rare now in this town which is paralysed by Byzantine, creativity-destroying planning rules. But buildings like this are common throughout BC, especially on the south coast islands where the climate is mild. What is it that’s so attractive about these places? Maybe it’s that their use of wood and large expanses of glass feel correct in a cloudy environment where warm materials and natural light become imperative. It’s probably also that compared to the often stodgy transplanted architectural styles and decor that are much more common here (Victorian, Edwardian, fake Tudor, etc.), handbuilt houses represent boldness, freedom, innovation, creativity, freedom and pleasure. They’re closer to modern design, but it’s a much more freestyle, playful version of modern architecture, not the austere, almost protestant modernism we’re used to. These houses aren’t machines for living, as the modernists dictated; they’re theatrical stages and/or sanctuaries. They represent a kind of third modern design option, something that’s neither traditional nor modernist. For some of us in North America, seeing the European counterpart of our hippie houses feels peculiar because we often have the false assumption that this brand of hippie utopianism is a distinctly New World thing, but clearly we don’t own it.

Each glashus, or glasshouse, is made from salvaged wooden windows.

This fantastic riverside house has a sod roof; closer view below. This is more an expensive piece of classic modern architecture, and less a handmade hippie house.  Christiania has grown a little more gentrified, but on the other hand this is a great sustainable house, and probably warmer than the beautiful but chilly early Christiana houses in the Danish winter. As an article in the Independent pointed out, Christiania has to a large extent just traded flower power for solar power.

The house above is weirdly reminiscent of John Lautner’s Chemosphere house. Below, something slightly more traditional. Without a planning code, inventive building styles proliferate in a wildly mixed way.

This “banana” shaped house was built by a group of Germans who came as volunteers to erect bridges in the colony and were subsequently allowed to build their own place.

Thanks to photographers on Flickr for these excellent photos: Line Lyng, Christian Svanes Kolding, Dave Gorman and Henrik.

Why are round windows so uncommon in North America? When we do see them here, either in house or garden, they seem somehow magical. Maybe that’s just because we see them so seldom. Round, eye-level windows are quite prevalent in many other places, including Central and South America, the Middle East, Africa and parts of Europe. For whatever reason, when we do see round windows on this continent, they are mainly associated with something exotic: either Asian design – the feature windows in Japan or China in ceremonial  rooms or in garden walls – or with futurism or science fiction, such as circular doorways on spaceships or 1970s utopian or alternative architecture. There are two exceptions: (1) the rose windows in North American churches, and (2) the small maritime-influenced decorative windows in Eastcoast colonial architecture. But these aren’t windows you look out from; they are windows to make you feel short. They are usually placed very high, they are either made from stained glass or are made too small for a view, and they’re usually mullioned rather than being open circles. We’re more interested here in the sort of round windows that are placed at human height to frame a contemplative view and to provide some relief from the rectilinearity of rooms and architecture. Above, the round garden wall opening is in a Chinese garden in Sydney, Australia. Below, two round windows at Arcosanti, the eco-city built by Paolo Soleri in Arizona in the 1970s – the first is in the Crafts III building and the second is in a breakfast nook.

Round windows are a striking, dynamic design feature and they’re underused, which is odd because they are not impossible to build. Even when they are slightly more expensive than regular windows, they give a lot of design value compared to what you spend. Is it thanks to the stigma that is still attached, annoyingly, to 60s and 70s decor that we don’t see them much? They really need to make a comeback. It doesn’t have to look like the below, even though this sunken 70s dining area in the US is fantastic. Photo from The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement, Greystone Press. The photo above is from the Terence Conran House Book, and is of a loft in Berlin.

Above, Annette’s “shack” in N. E. England. Handmade hippie houses in England and N. America often featured round windows. Below, an open, circular window in an annex to Brazil’s Ministry of Exterior Relations is by internationally renowned Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. It looks out into a garden of little yellow flowers and a geometric tiled wall.

Many more round windows below – click for more.

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