Handmade Utopia: Back-to-the-Land Architecture in Northern California

Handmade Utopia: Back-to-the-Land Architecture in Northern California explores the handmade homes and unconventional lives of the back-to-the-land pioneers who settled across Northern California in the 1960s and ’70s.

Traveling through redwood forests and hidden dirt roads, photographer Michael Schmelling captures these remarkable, often secret residences, while David Jacob Kramer’s oral histories reveal the stories behind them. Alongside archival materials, the book documents a disappearing chapter of experimental architecture, self-reliance, and communal living.

• Edited with text and oral histories by David Jacob Kramer. Foreword by Jentri Anders. Photographs by Michael Schmelling.
• Dimensions: 8.8 x 1.4 x 11.8 in.
• 496 Pages