This isn’t a story — it’s a sketch of a story. We were traveling through Arizona and spotted this abandoned house in Portal, Arizona.

What makes this mystery so compelling is a grave marker for Edward John Hand, pioneer, rancher, miner, archaeologist. I imagine a solid man, tall, English-born (1866), exploring the American West and building this one-room adobe structure with his own hands.

My internet research turned up nothing about this man and his simple home. I’m finding much of the American West — possibly the best stories — are not google-able.

The Orange Peel House was a portable plywood structure made in Germany that took about 15 minutes to assemble. In 1955 you could buy it for about $150. Perfect for a glamorous camping trip. I want one for Burning Man.

Source: Popular Mechanics, reposted by Modern Mechanix.

Photographer Paul Herzoff has 56 prints in the Smithsonian online archives from 1970 – 1973 and I came upon this stash from Sheila Newbury’s blog. These beautiful photographs feature old housetrucks (trucks and buses made into living spaces), craftsmen and the families who dwell within, mostly in California.

Sheila writes:

Herzoff frequently trains his camera on the vehicles themselves, as if they were a collection of large, patient carnival creatures, waiting on their masters’ whim for the next phase of the journey to begin.

There’s a poignancy to these portraits now, over thirty years later: they’re affectionate toward their subjects (not a note much sounded in contemporary photography), admiring of the ingenuity required to live a life of adaptive independence, yet clear-eyed about its fragility.

Mining relics… this is an old engine house in Cornwell. Photographed by Thenenan T. Kig. Via BldgBlog.

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw did like writing in this little 8×8 shed, from what I gather, sometimes referred to as his summer house. It was built with casters on a circular track so it could be rotated in relation to the sun. It was also wired for an electric heater and typewriter. For more info, visit the National Trust.

My sources tell me that the Flordellen was the first ever RV. It was commissioned and named by Chicago-born Leonard S. Whittier of Elmira, NY. Measuring over 30 feet in length, it had electric lighting, heat and refrigeration, oven, stove, bathroom… all the luxuries of a modern home of the 30s… built on a van chassis in 1927? Wow.

In 2008, artist and filmmaker James Benning built two cabins in the Sierras. One was a replica of Henry David Thoreau‘s cabin in which he wrote his first book. The other is a reproduction of Ted Kaczynski’s cabin. (Mr. Kaczynski is serving a life sentence in prison without parole.)

Benning’s work reminds us that self imposed isolation can do very different things, and, as the NAIL V project asks, “At what point does an iconoclast become a sociopath?  And who decides this?”

Cruising the streets of New Orleans vicariously via Housewatcher, I enjoy being reminded of the simple beauty of the vernacular. Found on Flickr by way of Lloyd.

Nat Mendelsohn had a very, very large dream that was never realized. He purchased 80,000 acres in the Mojave Desert in 1958 and called it California City. He called it many things, apparently, as all the streets have been named.

But look at this google map and you’ll find there is no there there.

Much more than a ghost town, this is a full-scale ghost city — a city that was never built. In celebration of Obscura Day on March 20th, there will be a photographic tour of this “unintentional land art” hosted by the author of BLDGBLOG (one of my favorite minimalist blogs). Though I will be unable to join this road trip expedition, I do wish Google Street View would make it out there.

This small desert dwelling was built with a $300 budget by two young architects, Soleri and Mills, once apprentices of Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West in the 1940s. They camped out at the site while designing and building this aluminum and glass dome house in Cave Creek, Arizona. Utilizing passive heating and cooling, the dome-part of the home had two sliding tracks — one in glass and the other screened.

This was the first published project by the architects. Top photo was photographed by Julius Shulman, courtesy Taschen, from Metropolis Magazine Sept 2007. The lower photo was taken by Mark Mills.