When people see the castle that Jim Bishop built for the first time, the reaction is almost always the same: How can a single man build a giant castle all by himself? The answer lies in decades of manual labor, creativity, and stubbornness. It all began in 1969, when he built a first room on … Read more
Housing NOW is a modular bamboo housing system that provides rapid, affordable homes in Myanmar’s conflict- and disaster-affected regions. They use small-diameter bamboo bundled into structural frames that interlock to form the backbone of each house. This method uses abundant, low-value bamboo culms from local sources and transforms them into load-bearing construction elements through bundling, … Read more
When you stand beneath Mizzi Studio’s mushroom-like pavilion at Carbon Garden in London on a sunny day, light filters through the flax and resin cap of this mysterious “fruiting body,” as founder Jonathan Mizzi describes it. “The material has this lovely translucent quality,” he says. “When you stand under it, you become held in this … Read more
This video shows how one man can build his own home in the woods without the use of modern fasteners and other building materials. He is ingenious in his creation of a lifting apparatus and other tools. This project was a real test of strength, patience and faith in one’s own hands. You can watch … Read more
“We all grew up with the Three Little Pigs,” Greg Bossie says. “So people have a lot of misconceptions about the viability of straw as a building component.” But no one’s huffing, puffing, and blowing houses down that are constructed or renovated by Rare Forms, a unique construction company that Bossie founded in 2020. “We … Read more
The Ugly Truckling is a house truck that was hand built by a woman named Kai in British Columbia over the course of many years. She is a carpenter and an artist, so she did all of the design and woodworking while her husband, Ben, worked on the systems for electricity and gas. Kai and … Read more