Over the years I’ve had the great pleasure of viewing thousands of homes built with natural materials such as sustainably harvested wood poles, earth, straw, stone, and recycled materials. So which natural home is my personal favorite? I’d have to go with Simon Dales’ woodland home in Wales. Not only is it absolutely stunning from many different views, it’s also very low cost (3,000 pounds or $4,500), practical to build (4 months by 2 workers) and live in, and super energy efficient due to the thick straw bale insulation. The cost is very important. Almost anyone can afford a home like this.
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Informative Presentations at the NBC
Along with all of the the outdoor hands-on workshops at the Natural Building Colloquium were even more indoor presentations, mostly accompanied by slides. It was impossible to attend them all, so I’ll report on just a few of them.
I had two opportunities to do presentations myself, both about earthbag building around the world, as well as the time that I presented what I knew about rebuilding Nepal with earthbags to the design charette on that topic. These were well received and people were amazed at the extraordinary variety of earthbag projects on every continent.
Robert LaPorte and Paula Baker-LaPorte, a design/build team did a nice retrospective of the work they have done under the banner of EcoNest. They have specialized in light straw/clay building.
Jacob Racusin, one of the authors of The Natural Building Companion did a two part presentation about building science for natural builders that had many people talking about it for days.
Ziggy Liloia, blogger on The Year of Mud, did a very moving presentation about his tribulations with building his first cob home at Dancing Rabbit in Missouri. I was quite impressed with his willingness to reveal the many costly mistakes that he had made along the way.
An intensive two part discussion about building codes was presented by David Eisenberg (of The Development Center for Appropriate Technology), Art Ludwig (of Oasis Design), Martin Hammer (of Builders without Borders) and Bruce King, an engineer. Bruce King also did a presentation entitled Natural Building, Unnatural Building, and the future of Building, with many worthwhile insights.
Sunray Kelley’s Tree House
During one of the early morning circles Sunray Kelley pointed up the hill to a group of trees and explained that he would be building a tree house there and that people were welcome to join him in the project. It didn’t take him long to attract a group of helpers willing to go around scrounging structural elements for this.
Sunray is a well known character around previous colloquia and a famous artist/builder in his own right. He grew up in the woods of Washington State and still resides on the family property, where he gleans material for most of the building that he has done there. I have never seen him wear shoes.
Videos about the Meditation Dome
There are two nice videos about how the earthbag Meditation Dome that was featured in yesterday’s post was built. Even though the titles are in Chinese, they explain a lot about the refinements of how they fashioned this extremely precise work of art. Enjoy!
Solar powered air conditioning
“CSIRO has invented a new three in one solar air conditioning system that provides hot water, cooling and heating.
Integrated Aqua-Vegeculture System
Abe of VelaCreations.com sent us this tip about a super-efficient growing system. You might remember that we profiled his new sustainable gardening/homesteading book a few months back.