Caine's book explores the ways of life in Chillca, a small community on the flanks of Mount Ausangate in Peru, 14,000 feet above sea level. In this village of 350 people, women are the primary pastoralists, tending to herds of alpacas, llama and sheep.
Health has become a central concern in architecture, planning, and design, driven by a growing awareness of how the built environment influences physical, mental, social, and environmental well-being. In 2025, this awareness moved beyond specialized building types or performance metrics and became central to architectural decision-making, informing how spaces are conceived, built, and inhabited across diverse contexts. Architects are no longer treating health as an external requirement but as an integral condition of everyday life.
In horror fiction, a zombie is a human ghost or spirit "somewhere between living and dead, puppeted by external forces". This book explores real zombies in the natural world: organisms that lose control to exploitative parasites as seen in a tropical wasp that paralyses a cockroach, leading to its consumption by the wasp's young. This concept may extend to humans being susceptible to 'zombie bugs'.
The vision is simple: to offer a home that feels both rooted and free, where modern comforts coexist with the gentle rhythms of water and wildlife.
