I love a good building book for inspiration, especially when it contains photos of inventive and intelligent homes from around the world. Imagine houses with six feet-thick seaweed roofs, deep-nestled and hand-carved cave homes, and pigeon-harboring huts made of mud. These and more are all vividly documented in Built By Hand: Vernacular Buildings Around the World, a most inspiring bit of natural building eye candy. Built by Hand is a hardcover collection of photographs by Yoshio Komatsu of traditional buildings of all styles across the globe.

Broken up mostly into chapters devoted to different building elements, including earth, stone, wood, and thatch, Yoshio Komatsu’s collection of photographs is pleasing to navigate and is definitely aimed at visually stimulating the reader. Each chapter includes a short introduction, with some extra brief text interspersed midway describing each element and its building and/or cultural significance. Additionally, each gorgeous photo is clearly captioned with a location and brief description.

Let’s be clear. This book is mostly about Komatsu’s photos. Although the text does provide some helpful background information, don’t expect an explanation on how to thatch your own roof, for example. There’s not that much in the way of information about the people and cultures who built these homes, either. The photos mostly speak for themselves and provide much in the way of enlightenment. The variety of content is impressive, too, with everything from adobe homes in the American southwest to house boats on the Niger River in Mali.

Built By Hand will put your imagination to the test when you consider the ingenuity of traditional peoples and their adaption of incredibly basic building elements to craft truly exquisite homes and structures. Can hyper-civilized society, with its seemingly endless concrete, shiny steel, and artificial-infested houses and buildings learn something from the vernacular building still practiced?

Whatever the case, this book is definitely inspiring, especially if you like to ponder natural building design. I love to flip through the pages and wonder what a house in my own neck of the woods would look like if it were truly local and hand-built…