Shelter II
About the Authors

Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn (born 1935) has 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. Returning to California in 1960 to work as an insurance broker, he suddenly quit his insurance job and began work as a carpenter, eventually building four houses.

Kahn next worked for Stewart Brand as Shelter editor for the Whole Earth Catalog. During 1970 Kahn started a book-publishing house, Shelter Publications, and published his first book, Domebook One, followed the next year with Domebook 2. These books were followed by the now classic Shelter in 1973, and a series of fitness books, including Stretching, by Bob Anderson, which has sold over 3,000,000 copies.

During 2004, Kahn published Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter. Home Work summarizes the best of his work over the past 30 years photographing buildings and interviewing builders, and includes numerous buildings directly inspired by the book Shelter.

Kahn's Builders of the Pacific Coast, published in 2008, features a unique group of builders along the Pacific Coast from California to British Columbia. Kahn is currently working on a new book, Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter about the growing movement towards human-scale housing.

In keeping with his fitness theme, Kahn, at the age of 75, continues to surf, skateboard (longboard) and run (the Dipsea Race) competitively. He and his wife Lesley live and work in a small town on the Pacific Ocean coast north of San Francisco, California.

Bob Easton

A fourth generation Californian, Bob Easton studied architecture at University of California Berkeley and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. Fascinated by the counterculture movement in the 1960’s and the work of Buckminster Fuller, he collaborated with Lloyd Kahn on the Domebooks and Shelter books in the early 1970’s.

Bob practices architecture in Santa Barbara and has taught architectural design at UCLA. He has continued to design and co-author award winning books. Santa Barbara Architecture was locally published in 1981, and Native American Architecture, in collaboration with anthropologist Peter Nabokov, was published by Oxford University Press in 1990.