The project in Vanuatu is moving along. Here are the final drawings. We modified my $300 Earthbag House design to meet the needs of locals in Vanuatu. The houses are clustered, two rooms have been added in each house, the porch enclosed and a common outdoor work area included.
Community
America’s 1st tiny house hotel in dense Portland
These are the sort of projects that people write me about and we discuss behind the scenes. This could be a great little business if you make the tiny houses yourself out of recycled materials. Build with cash one at a time.
Ark Soaring in the Sky
Kikuma Watanabe is an associate professor at Kochi University of Technology in Japan and is responsible for the overall design of this project. The owner is Kagayaku Inochi (glorious life), a Japanese NPO. This school for orphans is in Sangkhlaburi village, Thailand, located near the borderline between Thailand and Myanmar. In this area there are a lot of poor people who immigrated from Myanmar. This school aims to provide sustainable poverty alleviation in the area.
To provide a good future for the children, they hoped that the school would be designed to realize their dreams. So, at first the teacher asked the children to draw the dream of the school building. One of them drew a flying ship as his dream. They adapted his idea, and tried to translate the drawing into architecture.
Self-reliance in LA
“Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne have been farming their yard in Los Angeles for over a decade. In addition to a mini orchard and extensive veggie garden, they have all the instruments of an urban homestead: chickens, bees, rainwater capture, DIY greywater, solar fruit preserver, humanure toilet, rocket stove, adobe oven. But they don’t like to talk about sustainability of self-sufficiency, instead they prefer the term self-reliance.
Ripples Blog
“Ripples is a blog connecting people to resources on sustainable living while chronicling our off-grid journey and supporting the work of non-profit organizations.
Ripples Blog: Telling Our Story
Our goal is to build a healthy, organic lifestyle in a small earthbag home, using sustainable alternative systems for transportation, energy, water, food production and…well, everything! We hope to preserve habitat for native species in the Ozark Mountains while learning (and educating others) about native habitat creation. This blog follows our journey “off the grid”: using alternative electricity sources like solar power. The blog itself is also off-grid, powered by 100% solar energy!
Vanuatu Earthbag Project Report
In an effort to prove that a simple earthbag roundhouse could be built entirely with unskilled and inexperienced labor we made a leap of faith.
We bought a block of land on the island of Efate in Vanuatu. We intended to build a women’s centre and hoped to inspire pacific islanders to recycle and build safe affordable Eco housing. This is not a charity or a religious venture. It just started with one Australian family wanting to help some friends in a nearby island.