Elements of a Homebuilt House

Working excerpt taken from: HOME-BUILT HOUSE: Shelter for an Uncertain World, ISBN 978 09762741 7 9 (See PrePub Pitch here)

Abandoned Land: A homebuilt house is built on unwanted or otherwise unusable land, when ownership is unknown or confused. Neglected, abandoned, and unclaimed property occur on private and public land where the jurisdictions of local, regional, and federal authorities is loosely defined and unclear, especially along right of ways, reserves, or borders and boundaries between governing agencies, private parcels, and lands held in the public domain due to long abandoned titles.

Home as a Sense of Place: A homebuilt house starts by occupying a site long enough to establish a visible presence and a sense of place on the land as a home. This begins with informal gestures, incidental interactions, and minor site improvements that vaguely signal intent to settle on the land. Initial improvements might include removing trash, clearing weeds, trimming branches, and trying different paths to test unobtrusive ways to access a possible house.

Materials Negotiate Tenure: Months may pass with only minor improvements to the home-land before deciding to proceed with the house’s construction. Expendable materials are then used as pawns to signal intent and test reaction. First placed on the land, then slowly pieced together as a shelter on land already used as a home. Each piece of the assembly further tests the site’s potential for long-term occupancy. The process is slow and cautious; continuing for years with each step slightly more visible than the last.

Form Giving Resources: Where conventional housing begins with an engineered plan and permits, a homebuilt house starts without a plan and no preconceived idea of its eventual size or shape. The house emerges like sculpture, using whatever tools and materials that become available for its construction. The slow and methodical hands-on process means skills also evolve gradually as tools are accumulated and the house slowly morphs into a more ordered form.

Imperceptible Process: A homebuilt house evolves so slowly that no one knows when construction actually began or even if it continues. The key to its initial success is a patient strategy where no single action triggers a response from neighbors or regulators. The process requires a measured balance, incrementally taking on the beginnings of tenable housing, both recognized and ignored as it evolves over decades into its final form.

Three-dimensional storage: Keenly aware of the variables, a homebuilt house is assembled to be reconstructible, ready to be moved or reconfigured whenever an unforeseen event or some newly found material comes along. The result is an architecture shaped by chance and marginality. This is architecture at the baseline of consumption, almost Zen-like simplicity, not much more than the essence of what a house really is, but physically transparent, revealing the disorder that is a unique characteristic of its vernacular of uncertainty.

Intuitively Engineered: Where a conventional house is engineered according to manufactured materials and a predictable process, a homebuilt house is built intuitively, following the logic of trial and error. Its random materials mean each piece of the construction must be carefully considered in the context of what has already been assembled. Failures are resolved by reinforcing weaknesses with temporary solutions while continually exploring alternatives.

ConstantState of Improvement: Where most houses are in a constant state of deterioration, a homebuilt house is in a constant state of improvement. This means the house is constantly changing, growing slowly as it is shaped by its random resources, financial reserves, and the socio-political environment in which it is assembled. What we see as a result is an incomplete house-form, whose shape is shifting, evolving slowly, changing in response to life in an uncertain world.

Debt-Free and Self-Sustainable: To be sustainable, a homebuilt house must be debt-free. The primary motivation for the hardships and sacrifices necessary to build a homebuilt house is the reluctance of its builders to spend what little they might have on a mortgage, rent, taxes, fees, and unnecessary consumables. Already marginalized by an economic system that leaves them with just enough to survive, any payments to landlords and government agencies means a substantial portion of their income would be lost in mind numbing rituals that leave them with few opportunities.

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Where Design is Not an Option

Working excerpt taken from: HOME-BUILT HOUSE: Shelter for an Uncertain World, ISBN 978 09762741 7 9 (See PrePub Pitch here)

A construction model is a good example of a tool that has changed the way we build buildings today. For most, these models are important because they increase productivity, efficiency, and profit, along with better documentation and the long dreamed of hope of eliminating conflicts before they get into the field. To capitalize on their potential, proponents of construction modeling have adopted industry wide euphemisms like “building information models” or “BIM” just to sell the idea.

For SketchUp construction modelers, the ability to fabricate materials, preassemble them as pieces and think through a quick three-dimensional process, while intuitively inventing solutions, is a return to the traditions of the early builders. The ability to piece together a simple construction model signals a new age and self-determined approach for the hands-on builder.

The natural builder
As a consequence of our modernity, the work of builders has long been overshadowed by formal contracts, costs, and values that have made the instincts of a natural builder pretty much irrelevant in a formal economy. It now takes a great deal of education, training and experience to succeed in the construction industry

At the same time, informal builders work outside of a construction industry, untouched by money, profit or the satisfaction of a career. Impoverished, marginalized, and excluded by choice or chance, these builders build because there is no other option, no clear path to follow for their own personal security. To survive in an unregulated world, they must provide shelter for themselves and their families.

What is interesting is that many of these builders go far beyond what is absolutely necessary for basic shelter, some are clearly experimenting with new ideas, and almost all share an intuitive blend of self-confidence, optimism, instinct, and desperation that leads them to build what often appear to be outrageously dangerous structures.

Perched on steep hillsides or abandoned riverbeds, they put together buildings with a few hand tools, very little money, and an odd collection of materials hunted and gathered from whatever resources that surround them. The objects informal builders manage to find are indeterminate, which means they must constantly rethink their application, sorting and storing, waiting for some future inspiration — perhaps an idea that will be triggered by their next material discovery. All of this, with hunger and insecurity relentlessly at play, ready to discourage their carefully considered inventive strategies.

As a result, what we see in the informal sector are buildings shaped by luck, risk, and intuition. These are buildings assembled instinctively in a world where resources are unpredictable, random, and only available when found at little or no costs. Tools and experience influence quality, but constructions begin and end like sculptures. Without the luxury of a plan, design is not an option. Instead, pieces are assembled temporarily as a three-dimensional form of habitable storage, built to be deconstructed and reassembled as new materials are discovered and new configurations are created.

An instinct for construction
What’s interesting is that these are the same instinctive qualities shared by builders assembling pieces for a virtual construction model. Like informal builders, piece-based modelers share a tactile understanding of the three-dimensional potential of a material. This includes their willingness to visually test ideas by fitting a variety of objects into the details of an evolving physical form — assembling, deconstructing, and reassembling their buildings according to the self-determined “feel” of a natural builder.

This innate passion for construction can be seen in the assemblies of many of the buildings in an informal settlement, clearly reflecting the capacity of their owners to endure the unpredictable circumstances of their lives, the absence of any official support, and the impoverished nature of simply surviving in a net-zero economy. What remains is to wonder at the perceptive genius of their informal constructions, something that has long since been lost to the standards, rules, and regulations of a formal economy.

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Beyond Fashion and Style

Working excerpt taken from: HOME-BUILT HOUSE: Shelter for an Uncertain World, ISBN 978 09762741 7 9 (See PrePub Pitch here)

Most would agree that the cultural context of a building influences the characteristics of its physical form. These are usually seen as decorative features, part of a temporal and evolving style, with no universal truth or purpose other than to entertain the aspirations of their clients. When they work, the resulting buildings fulfill the expectations of their time and place with no lasting influence on society or construction technology.

Even classic building styles are self-defined by the historic, religious, or political discourse that surrounds them, icons of certain cultural values and not the result of some deeper social significance or aesthetic. As a result, we live with buildings that reproduce contemporary ideals only to be oddly antiquated with the passing of time.

The Vernacular of Net Zero
By contrast, a vernacular architecture describes the physical characteristic of a building that reflects a common method of construction that uses local labor and materials to satisfy the shared needs of a community without adding superfluous stylistic decorations. There is no feature in a vernacular that goes beyond the functional requirements of its existence as a building. As such a vernacular is not influenced by changing trends or fashionable statements that find themselves dated and worn in time.

Vernacular buildings are purposeful, reflecting a human response to their environmental, economic, and social context as a collection of inherent qualities that are often dismissed as crude and unsophisticated by proponents of more self-conscious building styles.

The buildings seen in the informal sector reflect many of the values of a vernacular architecture. While some include personal expressions, they all use the same locally salvaged resources, built with simple hand tools and an intuitive, almost primitive approach to their construction. The result is an immediately recognizable sense of disorder that reflects the essence of their function as pure shelter.

This absence of order is of course shaped by impoverished technical limitations, economic exclusion, and a subsequent social marginality that has reduced these buildings to their primal purpose. As such they are a natural response to a basic need for self-preservation as a derivative of a net zero economy with no governing social mandate or regulatory authority to care for them.

Intuitive Construction Methods
What’s interesting is that these informal buildings are slowly reinforced by the security that comes with tenure on land occupied with varying levels of economic success. As such, they are not simply the result of a community of people desperately and haphazardly assembling buildings. Instead there is a method to their construction that includes a carefully considered assumption of the potential of materials and methods, with clear evidence of varying levels of construction quality. The distinct features of an informal vernacular are driven by the limitations of the materials, tools, and skills available to their builders.

Though it’s easy to discount the resulting structures as completely inadequate, look closer and you see details that require solutions that would be difficult to duplicate with formal construction methods.

As a result, what we see in these informal buildings is an architecture stripped of the systemic support of an industry of processed materials and practices, leaving the informal builder to invent and implement solutions that are fundamental to their personal needs. Design exists as physical form of three-dimensional problem solving, depending solely on available resources and reduced to the essence of self-determination, imagination, and inventive thought.

The 3D modeling methods of these unique builders follow a survival strategy that holds clear lessons for construction in an uncertain world.

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