The Eliphante Art House

The Eliphante Art House is the home of artist Michael Kahn and his wife Leda Livant built from found materials. Located in Cornville, Arizona, it represents a fine example of folk art home building.

An excerpt:

ANY fool can hire an architect to draw up a plan for a house, but it takes a truly inspired fool — which is to say, an artist — to start building and see where the earth and driftwood and shards of broken pottery take him, and an equally impassioned fool — say, a woman in love — to go along and carry the rocks on her back.

The Eliphante Art House Website

The Mushroom House is the home of Canadian artist Zube, who has worked on it for over 22 years. Located in Whistler, Canada, the Mushroom House was inspired by glacial rock formations.

The site has a wonderful virtual tour of each room (click on the red dots on the site map).

I was just interviewed for Current TV (the Al Gore user created content channel). I hate the sound of my voice, so I couldn’t watch the whole thing, but it is beautifully edited.

Please be sure to vote for it when you watch.

Watch now…

This article on one of my mentors, Malcolm Wells, the father of underground building.

More on Malcolm here.

I first discovered Mac through this book in 1985. I wrote him a letter and we have been friends since. Beyond the ideas, his sketches are so evocative and extraordinary.

Great article on Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry.

Sensing that there were broader applications at the intersection of ecology, commerce, technology, and materials science, she cofounded the Biomimicry Guild in 1998 and developed models for applying biomimicry to industrial design and systems. Among her growing list of clients are Levi Strauss, NASA, Nike, Patagonia, Procter & Gamble, S.C. Johnson, and General Electric.

Buy the book now.

Look at the beautiful vertical garden architecture of Patrick Blanc.

Plants don’t need soil in any situation because the soil is merely nothing more than a mechanic support. Only water and the many minerals dissolved in it are essential to plants, together with light and carbon dioxide to conduct photosynthesis. Wherever water is available all year long as in tropical forests or in temperate mountain forests, plants can grow on rocks, tree trunks, and slopes free-of-ground.

An old friend and mentor, Edgar Tafel, spoke recently at Cornel. A review of his talk is below. Based in New York, Edgar also wrote one of the best accounts of Mr, Wright entitled Apprentice to Genius.

Tafel touched on Wright’s distinct style, called organic architecture, which involves a harmonious consistency between his buildings and their natural environments – one that “proceeds, persists and creates according to the nature of man and his circumstances,” as Wright himself once described. Through the images featured in Tafel’s slideshow, the audience was able to gain knowledge and appreciation of this European, avant-garde structural technique and innovative design. The various pictures of the Fallingwater residence, which was built in 1935 for Edgar J. Kaufman in southwestern Pennsylvania, capture this style distinctly, as the house itself is constructed over a natural waterfall.

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The incredible Ted Conference is an annual meeting of the global brain trust. They now have samples of some of the lectures given online. Here is one of them.

Ross Lovegrove is an industrial designer, best known for his work on the Sony Walkman and Apple iMac. In this highly visual presentation, he presents his recent work—from furniture to water bottles—which is organic in form and inspired by nature.

Watch his lecture

You Can Own An American Home
A Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition makes us ask: What can we learn from Wright’s ideas, and are we paying attention?

The recently opened “Frank Lloyd Wright and the House Beautiful” exhibition at Boise Art Museum (BAM) contains over 100 pieces–including furniture, fixtures, magazines, textiles, photos and rarely exhibited original drawings–organized around the theme of the “house beautiful” (Wright published a book by that title in 1897), or the idea that an interior’s style improved the life of its inhabitants.

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22 year old British artist/designer, Richard Sweeny, creates incredible paper sculptures from folded paper. Richard says, “I’m highly influenced by natural form; structures in nature are very efficient, the maximum is achieved using the least material and energy possible. Growth patterns produce forms that appear very complex, yet have a basic underlying principle.”

via Inhabit

more images on Flikr

Richard Sweeny Website