Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn (born April 28, 1935) is the founding editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications, Inc., and is the former Shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He is also an author, photographer, and pioneer of the green building and green architecture movements.

Kahn became interested in construction at age 12 when working on his family's house in Central Valley. He earned a BA from Stanford University. During the late 1950s, while serving in the United States Air Force in Germany, Kahn ran the USAF newspaper for two years. He returned to California in 1960 to work as an insurance broker and in 1965 quit his insurance job and began work as a carpenter, eventually building four houses.

Kahn's first project was a sod-roof studio in Mill Valley, with succulents planted on the roof. The second was a used-wood, timber-frame Japanese/Bernard Maybeck-influenced design: a post-and-beam frame, with several 10-foot (3.0 m)-high poured concrete walls. Before these two jobs, he'd had little building experience, but quickly learned on the job. This is where he discovered the owner/builder perspective in learning to build. He tried to maintain this outlook throughout his publishing career, so he could explain building techniques to novice builders. He next got a job in Big Sur as foreman building a large post and beam house out of bridge timbers from a dismantled bridge; the main structural members were 30' long, 8' X 22" redwood beams. He then built his own home out of used lumber and hand-split shakes in Big Sur, developed a water supply, and terraced a hillside for small-scale farming.

Influenced by Buckminster Fuller, in 1968 he started building geodesic domes. This resulted in a job coordinating the building of 17 domes at Pacific High School, an alternative school in the Santa Cruz mountains. Experimenting with geodesic domes made from plywood, aluminum, sprayed foam, and vinyl, children built their own domes and lived in them. Jay Baldwin built a dome covered with vinyl pillows. When Buckminster Fuller visited the school in 1970, he commissioned Baldwin to build a replica of the dome on his property in Maine. The school received media attention.

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