Here is an article by Morgan Caraway recently published in www.motherearthnews.comMy wife, Mary Jane, and I built our first earthbag home in 2009, after being inspired by the Mother Earth News book Earthbag Building. Our circular house was 20 feet in diameter and incorporated a bottle wall and reclaimed French doors. The build took us … Read more
Vera Kirkpatrick built a home in Ashland, Oregon using century-old posts and beams. The stay-at-home mom on a tight budget designed open rooms and decorated in a timeless, spare Scandinavian style. Beautifully rustic, hand-chiseled pine and cedar timbers are fitted with wooden pegs, but new construction materials and techniques like passive solar were also employed. … Read more
Bruce Jones left a comment on a recent blog post about some fun backyard sheds: “My family name is JONES so I’m a Welshman, five generations removed. Seeing these incredible creations is inspiring. I bought a small mountain in the High Desert of SoCal (part of the greater Mojave Desert) sixteen months ago and have … Read more
A 12 minute documentary of a Hobbit Hideaway built using the local, renewable materials of wood, stone, straw, clay, lime and mud. It is unique and beautifully built in Scotland by natural builders and educators Hartwyn Ltd. They shared the process with students in a pop-up learning village from June to September 2018. Hobbit Hideaway … Read more
Learn skills, techniques, and design theory to create your own beautiful, durable, energy-efficient home from local and site-harvested materials. Most of each day will be spent practicing a wide range of hands-on natural building systems, some ancient and time-tested, others experimental. This workshop teaches a wide variety of techniques that you can choose depending on … Read more
The ancient city of Machu Picchu, perched among the peaks of southern Peru, flourished for just over a hundred years between the mid-15th and mid-16th centuries. It is famous for its intricate, masterful stone masonry. But often invisible to the untrained eye is masterful drainage infrastructure and slope stabilization. Ruth Wright, a historian, travel writer, … Read more