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Rating: 
Summary: Superb
Review: Handbuilt Shelter reads like a wonderful mistery. This book is fantastic, and a goldmine for house-bilders with independent ideas. Don't dream your dream, live your dream! The stories behind each picture are very inspiring!
Rating:
Summary: Inspiring Look at UnconventionalHomes
Review: I escaped the suburbs of Dallas for the beauty of Colorado only to watch in horror as they filled in the empty spaces with cookie cutter beige houses. Now I live in the beautiful city of San Francisco where a lot of the houses have character - but they cost a million bucks. Lloyd's new book and the previous books in the Shelter series are beautiful reminders that it doesn't have to be this way. Seeing how other people have built original dwellings that reflect their dreams, personalities, and the surrounding landscape is an inspiration. Maybe there is hope after all.
Rating:
Summary: Inspiration for anyone who appreciates the art of building
Review: Lloyd Kahn's latest book on the ideas and independent solutions people have come up with for building is fantastic.
There is an element of nostalgia for anyone who grew up reading books from the alternative press. Llyod's publications being some of the best establish his credentials for this latest effort.
It's a small but potent reminder to all the creative builders who might have settled (or compromised) into the pre-fab burbs that there are still people creating unique spaces to live. A subtle reminder disguised as a colorful coffee table tome with a subtle subversive theme. The examples from his photos and short essays of people who with patience, perseverance and lots of creativity build houses only they envisioned.
Rating:
Summary: WHY ISN'T THIS AT THE TOP OF THE SEARCH LIST?
Review: The defacto primer for anyone living remotely indoors, anyone with architectural pretensions, any builder, city planner, all the rest of us. This is a collection of thousands of glimpses into personal versions of dwelling (over 3000 photographs, hundreds of sketches...someone here counted them) and a way of living that inspires. It is loaded with material. But, as Lloyd Kahn says at the end, this is just the beginning of five more years of building books. This is not the beginning though. This is already a life's work. Woven through the pages is the personal story of his life spent exploring, recording and publishing. A wonderful example.
Rating:
Summary: You've never seen anything like this book
Review: The reviews are all true below. The pendulum is finally swinging back for us younger folks? This book is like a revolutionary call for living another way. Free. Where you're remodeling and living for yourself instead of for "resale value." And you've never seen anything like this book because these are like secret houses. These aren't rich people with decorators clamoring for magazine space.
Rating:
Summary: Inspiring funky house book for the rest of us...
Review: This follow-up book to the original cool "Shelter" book is soooo cool and exciting, you'll have to run to the bathroom to tinkle. Go to the "ShelterPub" to see interesting travel stories. Lloyd's got his own back story and his company is a small indie place doing their own thing. They also do the Bill Pearl classic you see all dog-eared and tattered in gyms, "Getting Stronger." But if you're not rich and look at Architectural Digest as if it were from a foreign planet, then this is the book for the dreaming artist who's trying to imagine how to find a funky way of life between the yuppie cracks and saltine-box urban faux lofts. This is for the rest of us who can't/don't want to/or have mortaged ourselves up to our hairlines. It's inspiring and my best friend and I just got our copy and are fighting over who gets to go to sleep with it at night. So check out the other "Shelter" book and their shelterpub site. i'm so glad they're around in times like today when folks only publish what's sold before. It's a heavy, glossy book and full-color all throughout. It's hard to imagine that since the rah rah 80s, so many people have still managed to get away with so much individuality, beauty, and craziness. I recognize a bright blue house on the cover from a block away, and many of the neighbors were furious that he didn't paint it beige or taupe. Some of us shook his hand because bright blue paint was like graffiti all over the taupe way of life that has taken over this country. Yeeha!
Rating:
Summary: HOME WORK
Review: This is a wonderful book - beautiful and enormously useful. The photography of these "hand-made" houses is superb and the personal stories of the builders are interesting, funny, and moving. You don't even have to be interested in building or architecture to relish this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Lloyd Kahn Understand You.
Review: This is the best book of it's type that I have encountered. There are a lot of people out there building interesting structures with their own hands in their own way. For those who either are doing this or aspire to it, there isn't much out there in the way of books or cheerleading.
'Home Work' focuses largely on interesting homes built by baby-boomers who may or may not call themselves hippies, but are generally coming out of the 'back to the land' movement of the 60's and 70's that is generally associated with that subculture. This may or may not have been intentional on the part of the author. There is also a heavy West-coast bias at work. Every builder profiled seems to have a sauna & a beard and I could swear there's a pot plant in the foreground of one of the photos.
Honestly the stuff that the hippies started building 30 years ago is probably the cream of the 'interesting' owner-built homes in America. They had the will to build on their own, the low budgets that force creativity and building codes in rural areas were not quite so common as they are today. The timing was just right. Lloyd Kahn has found some of the coolest buildings that resulted from that hiccup of pioneering in the modern era, photographed them beautifully and humanized the builders.
Kahn takes time out half way through the book to celebrate simply-built structures and the joy of encountering them by presenting a series of photgraphic essays documenting his travels through regions thick with soulful buildings. Do you find yourself slowing down when you drive past solemn timber-framed barns or ramshackle sheds? Lloyd Kahn understands you. He has thoughtfully provided a number of pages of 'barn porn' for the junkies among us.
'Home Work' is a great source of not only ideas but affirmation that other people are in fact building some wierd stuff in the middle of nowhere and happily living in it. Perhaps it will give you the confidence you need to finally take the plunge.
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