Owner Built Homes and Homesteads

Ken Kern, author of THE OWNER-BUILT HOME and THE OWNER-BUILT HOMESTEAD, is an amazing fellow and everyone interested in decentralist, back-to-the-land, rational living should know of his work. Back in 1948 he began collecting information on low-cost, simple and natural construction materials and techniques. He combed the world for ideas, tried them and started writing about his experiments.

Eventually, Mildred Loomis started publishing Kern's articles in THE INTERPRETER, WAY OUT, and GREEN REVOLUTION. Ken has also issued a three-year series of pieces (called TECHNIC) on his own and a greenhouse-sun pit design of his has been featured in ORGANIC GARDENING.

This series of Ken Kern's work is being taken both from OWNER-BUILT HOME and OWNER-BUILT HOMESTEAD. To give you advance chapters of HOMESTEAD as they are written I have to break my presentation of HOME on an irregular basis for which I apologize.

—MOTHER EARTH NEWS

The Owner Built Homestead, Chapter 23: Development Goals

Reduced to basic terms, a productive homesteader must exert some measure of control over his environment. Implementing control requires various forms of physical development, starting

with goals and ending with the means for achieving these goals. We are constantly perceiving new needs and, to satisfy them, new patterns of activity are adopted: new forms are created and new means utilized. The developmental process is cyclic. We start with the elimination of old, unsatisfactory forms and patterns and—through the process of research, design and production—we create new, more satisfying forms and patterns. This process creates a rhythmic and balanced continuity in homestead development. It is truly a work of art.

Art is the making of things for the right reason. A homesteader is an artist, therefore, to the extent that he makes things according to the purpose of right reason, and to the extent that he becomes fully involved in the making: He uses his whole person . . . his body, his mind, his choosing and his imagination. In other words, the artist-homesteader first determines the purpose of the thing made (the Moral Cause); second, he uses his imagination to design an image of that thing which is foreseen (the Formal Cause); third, he seeks an understanding of the materials selected and used to create the thing imagined (the Material Cause); and finally, he selects the right tool to shape the material into the form desired (the Efficient Cause). Look after the causes of things; the effects will take care of themselves.

No one expressed these sentiments better than did Eric Gill who, in a lecture on Work and Culture; had this to say about man's sublimation into a "condition of intellectual irresponsibility":