Education

The Eco-Home Design Guide

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ecohomedesign

Christopher Day is a veteran of the world of architecture in Britain. In his new book, The Eco-Home Design Guide: Principles and practice for new-build and retrofit, he has condensed his considerable experience of both designing and hands-on building into a set of guiding principles for how to go about your own ecological building project.

The book is well organized into primary divisions that deal with the major issues that confront anyone who undertakes such a journey. These what, where, how and when issues are each examined in turn, so that by the time you complete the book, you should have a good understanding of all of the issues that need to be addressed. Each chapter is summarized at the end with a listing of the key points covered and a chart of the main choices that need to be made. With this approach, you can quickly thumb through the book to review the basic information presented.

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Gabion Beams for Earthquake Resilience

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I met Randolph Langenbach at the Natural Building Colloquium in New Mexico a few weeks ago, and was in the audience when this video was being recorded. Randolph has taken the original footage and enhanced it with many extra images, so that it is really better than it was the first time. I think the … Read more

Mainstreaming Natural Building

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breakout

At the recent Natural Building Colloquium in New Mexico, besides all of the workshops and presentations already mentioned in earlier blog posts, there were a number of fairly spontaneous breakout groups or conversations. I participated in a couple these; one was about the future of book publishing, but the most interesting one was looking at how we can bring natural building more into mainstream acceptance. This turned out to be a three day ongoing brainstorm with up to a dozen people at each session.

Janell Kapoor of Kleiwerks International proposed this discussion and it attracted many of the seasoned movers and shakers of the natural building movement. Joe Kennedy became the scribe, keeping 9 pages of notes of comments as they emerged.

Janell suggested doing a SWOT analysis, or looking at strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to accomplishing the goal of advancing natural building to become more commonly accepted practice. Rather than outline all of the collected suggestions, I will give you my opinion about these aspects.

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The Art of Natural Building Faire

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The last day of the Natural Building Colloquium in New Mexico was open to the general public as the Art of Natural Building Faire. We started out our day with the usual morning circle where several of the key organizers of the Colloquium were honored. This included Michael G. Smith who coordinated the entire schedule for the week; he did an excellent job of  this.

Michael G. Smith is honored for his service in coordinating the Colloquium.
Michael G. Smith was honored for his service in coordinating the Colloquium.

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Hands-On Workshops at the NBC

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In addition to the tree house and rocket stove projects already described, there were quite a few other hands-on demonstration projects happening at the Natural Building Colloquium (NBC), and I’ll describe a few of these.

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A simple straw bale wall was erected on a prepared concrete foundation; this was directed by Bill Steen with the assistance of Matts Myhrman and many others. This L-shaped wall would immediately serve as a kind of performance stage and could eventually be enclosed for a building.

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Rocket Oven and Griddle

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One of the ongoing workshops at the Natural Building Colloquium was the construction of a unique Rocket Stove design that incorporated both a large barrel oven and a huge griddle for baking and cooking. This was a joint project of Max Edleson (of www.firespeaking.com) and Flemming Abrahamsson from Denmark. The unit would become part of a covered outdoor kitchen that will serve the Black Range Lodge for many years to come.

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In the above photo you can see them just beginning to lay out the initial bricks on the concrete base. The fire box was on one end and the chimney was opposite this on the other end. The bricks were mortared with a clay and sand mix.

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