Shelter: Cultural & Ecological Designing

"The walls, with the windows and doors attached to them, form the house, but it is the empty space within that creates the essence of the house. This is the rule: the material harbors usefulness, and the immaterial imparts the true essence."
-- Lao Tse

"Any housing solution that involves paying for industrially produced building materials and commercial building contractors is doomed to certain failure. If houses are to be built at all, in sufficient quantity, they must be built without money. We must go right outside the framework of the money system, bypass the factories, and ignore the contractors."
-- Hassan Fathy

Ishmael Jay Taylor made us aware of http://www.eco-living.net/. Thank you! Evelin

Ashraf Salama kindly comments (8th August 2005):
My dear Ishmael; Many thanks for your message and Hassan Fathy's quote. You might be interested in having a look at Nabeel Hamdy, Afghani architect and professor, who wrote a book in the early 1990s named Housing Without Houses; there is another one by Clare Cooper Marcuse Housing as if People Mattered both complements some of the ideas generated by Fathy.