Bibliographic entries (nonfiction):

Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

Ken Kern, The Owner Built Home

Ken Kern, The Owner Built Homestead

Helen & Scott Nearing, Living the Good Life

If Y2K turns out to be very bad, we might end up having some REAL "reconstruction" to do, of the bricks and mortar kind!

The above titles point the way to a different, and in my opinion better, approach to the construction of homes, other buildings, and entire communities.

Christopher Alexander's books provide the basic principles. His prescriptions, if followed, would result in pleasant, livable, humane, convivial communities, filled with attractive, durable buildings which blend into the natural environment.

Kern & Nearing provide more practical, how-to advice for the individual homestead. The focus is not just on building a house as a place to live (or really just a place to sleep and store stuff, as the typical modern suburban lifestyle has it), but rather on the building of an entire homestead as an integrated whole, in harmony with the local environment and at least partially self-sufficient in the supply of food and energy.

The point of all of these books is that there is a better way to live. If we must rebuild, let's get it right this time.

-- Stefan Stackhouse (stefans@mindspring.com), August 14, 1999

Answers

Stefan, on a tip from my sister who was working as a librarian at the time, my wife and I obtained copies of both "The Timeless Way of Building" and "A Pattern Language" and used them as a basis for building our house.

They work - in a deep way. Once you've gone through the exercise, it is really funny how "curb appeal" houses seem "shallow" in that they look good visually, but don't lend themselves a being at "home" feeling the way the patterns suggested in Alexander, et al's stuff does.

So - I second the recommendation on these.

-- Tom Stein (indagatr@istar.ca), November 29, 1999.