Shelter, by Lloyd Kahn.
Apart from my personal preferences for F&SF along with the occasional thriller and some dry historical tomes, I especially enjoy house porn, and Shelter is one of the best books to start with. In its pages you will find no Christopher Wrens and you will find no Frank Lloyd Wrights. Instead, you will find hand built homes, house trucks, portable fabric structures and hollowed out cave dwelling societies that have outlasted the civilizations which periodically claim dominance over the region. You will find pages on building with wood, grass, mud/dirt/sod, and the inevitable use of plastics and other manufactured materials. You will learn why dome houses photograph well but are a bad idea when it comes to living in something which is weather tight and comfortable. You will see the beauty of an abandoned cruck cottage slowly collapsing into the ground, reclaimed by the soil from which its materials have sprung. You will understand why you don't see saltbox houses in the tropics or adobes in northern climes (unless the builders were being aggressively stupid). Hopefully, it will send you on your own journey towards making wherever you live more like a home and less like "a pile of stuff with a cover on it" (thank you for that apt description, George Carlin).
( Felis Concolor, Thu 12 Jan 2012, 1:51, Reply)