Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Hippie Architecture

I was recently thinking back on my childhood and the place I grow up. It was not what most people would consider to be a “normal” childhood, but as a kid you’re not really concerned with what others would call “normal”. Isn’t “normal” just a setting on the dryer anyway?

I spent most of my childhood on a hippie commune in Tennessee, called The Farm. The Farm was started in the early 70’s by a small group of hippies originally from San Francisco, CA. When they arrived in Tennessee, out of necessity most of the buses they used to travel the country were now converted into makeshift houses.

When my family moved to The Farm we were assigned to a household called Dogwood Bottom (each house had a name rather than an address). Dogwood Bottom was really a house at all, it was an old military tent set up on a wood platform with one of the old school buses sticking out one side. There wasn’t actually enough room in the house for us. So, another bus was set up for my family to live in. All the seats had been removed and bunk beds where built along one side of the bus, a large bed in the back for my parents and a wood stove for heat.

Shortly after we moved to The Farm, my grandmother also moved there (not necessarily by choice). She moved into a VW micro bus with a small addition built into the side. This was a major adjustment for a Methodist pastor’s widow, but she kept the complaining down to a low rumble.

There were many other unique houses on The Farm, of all different sizes and shapes. Some built with what ever scraps of lumber that could be scrounged, others very creative and resourceful. This is where my interest in architecture and more specifically tiny house began.

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