Lloyd Kahn’s latest endeavor was to document an art form that is, above all, temporary in nature: driftwood shelters. “I don’t know who the builders are, and they don’t use nails. Most of the structures are gone in a few weeks: wind, rain, or the rangers knock or burn them down,” he said.
A builder, gardener, author and publisher who has lived in Bolinas for nearly 50 years, Mr. Kahn this year published “Driftwood Shacks: Anonymous Architecture Along the California Coast.” It joins his impressive collection of books on a variety of topics—from stretching to septic systems to tiny homes—published by his press, Shelter Publications, Inc., which he co-founded in 1970 with wife, Lesley. A family affair, his son Evan now also contributes.
“Driftwood shacks are anonymous and transitory, and also they are architecture,” Mr. Kahn said.
The book features photographs of driftwood structures built along the California coast, accompanied by a short introduction. “A good audience for this book is surfers, but also beach lovers,” said Mr. Kahn, who presented slides from the book at the Bolinas Community Center last month. “People go to the beach to hike, camp, play volleyball, pick up bones and shells, driftwood. It’s about everything that goes on at the edge between land and water.”
Mr. Kahn said his love for the ocean began the first time he went swimming far from shore at age 17 in San Francisco, where he grew up. “It changed my life: the blue sky, the water, the waves,” he said. Soon after, he went surfing for the first time, when the sport was still young in California and wetsuits were not invented. He was hooked.
As a student at Stanford, he decided to major in business because there were no Friday classes, and he started making regular weekend trips to Santa Cruz. “We’d jump off the cliff into the water: the whole game was to try to stay dry for as long as you could,” Mr. Kahn said. “There’s a certain level of commitment when it’s 50 degrees in January.”
But a long-standing love for the ocean wasn’t his only pull toward driftwood. Mr. Kahn described how the counterculture of the 1960s redirected his life and changed his relationship with the built world.
In 1958, at age 23, Mr. Kahn served as a United States Air Force lieutenant and newspaper editor in Germany. After spending a handful of years working as an insurance broker in Mill Valley, he quit the job in 1965 to pursue other interests.
“There was an explosion of information in the ‘60s,” Mr. Kahn explained, rattling off, “building your own house, astrology, astronomy, Buddhism, Hinduism, rock n’ roll, Edmund Scientific catalogues, communicating with dolphins, science fiction, “Stranger in a Strange Land.” All this wonderful stuff was going on.”
After leaving his job as a broker, he started to learn how to build. He became an expert on geodesic domes—the subject of numerous publications of his—and had completed two houses before buying land in Bolinas and starting to build the house he lives in today.
From the beginning, Mr. Kahn was also interested in spreading information, especially about a way of living that was more connected to the elements. He was the shelter-section editor for the Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture magazine published primarily between 1968 and 1972 that focused on self-sufficiency, ecology, alternative education, holism and “do it yourself.” It featured the slogan: “access to tools.”
In 1973, Mr. Kahn released the book “Shelter” to worldwide acclaim. The oversized, magazine-style publication chronicles the history of handmade homes and offers illustrated instructions and an abundance of notes and graphs. The book was translated into multiple languages, sold over 250,000 copies and was re-released in 2000.
Mr. Kahn said he was slightly older than the generation that took the 1960s by storm, but he joined them anyway, demonstrating his uncanny ability to keep up with—or stay ahead of—the curve. (The now 84-year-old uses Instagram like the best of them.)
“Things are different now,” he said. “Back then, it was pretty easy to get by, but now the cost of rent and living is high and that makes things difficult. Hopefully there is a new wave coming along of people who know they can do things for themselves and connect with the built world. The thing I tell people is to just start. If you start, then you have to figure it out.”
And what about driftwood? After quitting running and spending less time in the ocean—“the thing is, now that I’m older, it’s just so fucking cold,” he said—Mr. Kahn started hiking more, especially along the coast. He noticed more and more of these secret structures, and even tried his hand building a few.
The book is available at Point Reyes Books and on the Shelter Publication’s website, shelterpub.com.