Ken Kern was an architect who published a series of books in the 1970s starting with the classic The Owner-Built Home, and followed by The Owner-Built Homestead, The Owner-Builder and the Code, and The Work Book. The last, written with his sister Evelyn Turner, a psychologist, is a case study of people who built their own homes and the effect it had on their lives. Stewart Brand reviewed it in The Whole Earth Catalog. “About 80 percent of the couples I know who have built a house or a boat, they build it, then they split up,” Brand wrote. “Happened to me too.” I was concerned about that, since my wife and I were building our own house (that was 1977—we’re still together). I referred to The Owner-Built Home a lot. It is full of practical advice about building techniques, materials, tools, and contains useful references, many of them arcane such as where to get a soil-cement block press, for example or a squat toilet (Kern travelled the globe after graduating from architecture school). I never met him but we corresponded. According to John Raabe, who worked for Kern, the architect-builder died (in the mid 1990s) in one of his own creations. He had just fnished building an experimental dome using slip-formed concrete, and decided to spend a night in it. There was a freak rain storm, and the dome collapsed on its hapless creator. The perils of owner-building.