The need for shelter is one of mankind’s most basic, and mankind has been inventive in creating homes to fill this need. This book looks at the principal types of wooden and stick frame structures built around the world, and examines how their shape and form reflect cultural and cosmological considerations as well as climatic and utilitarian ones. The book charts the gradual shift from the circular homes of nomads to the rectangular ones favored by settled people, and examines the new geodesic experiments of the 20th Century.

• Explore simple home materials: grasses, woven panels, bamboo, canvas, skin and bark

• Learn the characteristics of Native American tipis, yurts and their variations, and Bedouin tents

• Discover construction principles that make simple homes sound: squared timber and pegged mortise and tenon joints, geodesic domes, and triangularity