Commonsense Architecture
Natural Building: Creating Communities Through Cooperation
Education
Sweat Equity – Building a House at Half Cost
A 48-page easy to read ebook that describes the many advantages of building your own home without the help of contractors. It explains how we’ve become financially crippled by easy credit and how the inflation of home prices has caused the housing crisis.
Free Training Materials for Natural Builders
I’ve been corresponding with a long time reader about how to develop low cost natural building training courses. The idea is to provide a range of free and low cost training materials that instructors can choose from to develop training programs for students. Kelly and I have already made a pretty good start with our videos, free plans, online articles, blog posts and Instructables. Some of these are listed below for ease of reference. These free materials could be supplemented with my low cost Earthbag Building Guide and/or DVD.
Interns Wanted for International Aid Work
“Who learns skills for free? Interns who assist aid organizations.
Learn and serve in the US only or here and overseas as well. Build Simple Inc. offers free training in construction and design of geo-textile buildings like earthbag and straw wattle or techniques like Ubuntu-blox that use agricultural waste or plastic trash.
Two weeks of training near Albuquerque, NM is being scheduled for early July, with repeat dates in September. Help BSI to advance building knowledge about alternative techniques while you learn. Builders, photographers, building designers, and service team leaders can all contribute needed skills. Engineers and engineering students are especially needed to test structures- ask about donating a day or getting involved in an ongoing study.
Earthbag Building in Kenya
We are always pleased to hear from people around the world about their building projects. I recently received this email, along with several photos:
“Dear Kelly I have seen your inspiring works with earthbags and am happy to inform you that I am also into green building here in Kenya. I have done a demo house using earthbags and will be going for the next level of building as an eco-friendly training school using this method. We would want to include off grid power eventually, but that is for the future. Regards, Barry Kungu”
Sustainable Building Networks
Do you have a sustainable building network in your area? If you do, it will make the process of building with alternative materials much easier. These networks pull together all sorts of key information to guide people through the building process. Here’s an example of a sustainable building network I stumbled across in India called the Rural Housing Knowledge Network (RHKN)