“The HU is a Mongolian rock band formed in 2016. With traditional Mongolian instrumentation, including the Morin khuur, and Mongolian throat singing, the band calls their style of music ‘hunnu rock,’ hu being a Mongolian root word for ‘human.’” –Wikipedia
Full screen, turn it up…
See: Steppe Change: How Mongolian Rock Band The Hu Conquered the World
From Maui Surfer
Description: www.theguardian.com/…
From Maui Surfer
Dear Lloyd,
Well, the books you were kind enough to send to me, I put to good use, as I’m teaching a tiny homes class at the prison as an ACE class, which stands for Adult Continued Education program. I’m now on my second class. The first one had 16 guys and this one has 21 guys. It’s a 10 week class and each person has to design his own tiny home to scale and they have to pass two tests to get a certificate. The hope is that they will then be able to design a tiny home when they get out of prison.
Here in North Carolina, they just announced that they are building a whole village of tiny homes for the homeless. I think it’s a great thing and when I’m teaching, I tell these guys getting out of prison that it really is perfect for them also. If I can get even one or two guys to buy in and build one, I will be very happy that I’ll have gotten someone to improve his life.
I try and explain that when you first get out, you won’t have a good enough paying job or the work history for a bank to give you a home loan. Nor do you have a credit score that’s high enough. And with homeless rates rising, most people are a paycheck or two from being that way. I go on and explain that if you rent a one bedroom (the average rent here is about $550 or $600.) In 10 years that’s $66,000-$72,000 and if you spent $10,000-$15,000 on your tiny home you’d save over $50,000 in the 10 years.
So I thank you for my teaching gig now my friend.
Sincerely,
DW
Federal Correctional Complex, Butner, North Carolina
Catalysts for Change When the baby boom generation grew up, many of them rejected material success and its accompanying conformity, and sought other avenues in life and means of expression.
It’s hard to believe, but all the following ideas, concepts, perceptions, movements, arts, practices, discoveries, and acts were going on in the ’60s:
Zen Buddhism, meditation, the Tarot, the Kabbalah,
the I Ching, martial arts, women’s liberation,
gay rights, the sexual revolution, black power,
Native American culture, marijuana and LSD,
political activism, building your own house,
organic gardening and farming, revival of crafts,
alternative energy sources: sun, wind, and water,
organic gardening and farming,
ecological awareness, self-sufficiency,
the Beat poets, the blues and rock ‘n’ roll,
the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan,
Rolling Stone magazine and dozens of new
underground newspapers, dolphin consciousness,
viewing the earth from space,
The Whole Earth Catalog,
planetary consciousness, whole systems,
the West Coast publishing revolution,
the first desktop computers, domes,
long hair, new styles of dressing,
the Human Be‑In, the Monterey Pop Festival…
Note: Many of these things were not so much new, as they were new to this very large group of young people — who had the time and means to study and experiment — and set out on new courses in their lives.
All of these things were part of our world in the ’60s, and carried over into what we did in the ’70s, including building this homestead.
From my almost-just-completed book, The Half-Acre Homestead. (This is kind of a footnote in the appendix describing briefly what happened in the ’60s, because the values and discoveries of those times are reflected in the building of our homestead.)
Indoor pool at The Berkeley City Club, designed by Julia Morgan in 1927. Photo by Danetha Doe – Reprinted with permission
Julia Morgan is one of my favorite architects. This is an article on her work in The Bold Italic:
A Local’s Guide to Architect Julia Morgan’s Legacy in the East Bay
Bob Easton, who designed (and did all the hand-lettered headlines and drawings of small buildings) in Shelter with me in 1973, has been an architect ever since, and today sent me this note, along with this photo:
“…got busy this week, in the middle of renovating 120-year-old Episcopal church here in Montecito.”
The church was apparently designed by Arthur Benton in 1900.
I was a FLW fan in the early ’60s. We went to Taliesin West (on the same trip, hung out a bit with Paolo Soleri at his compound in Scottsdale, where he had just built this beautiful underground grotto/studio). Slept on the deck of a burned-down FLW house nearby. Visited the house (in Pasadena?) with imprinted concrete blocks and also got a tour of a home in Marin County by a guy named Berger who built it himself.
So FLW’s engineering sucked. He was an artist!
This was sent in by Ed today. For the thread that started the FLW conversation, see comments on this post: My Little Hut in the Woods
Just ran across this shot from a 2005 trip to Viet Nam. Sometimes a building is perfect without even knowing it.
I live in a little Co-Housing on a farm just outside a small town in Switzerland. In Spring 2017, I sold my the little caravan that I was living in and started sleeping at the edge of the forest 200 yards from the farm, under some huge beech trees. By the end of Summer, I was feeling really at home there and decided I would make myself a home, so I could stay there in Winter.
I could already see the place for my shelter, hugging in between a small ash tree and an overgrown pile of dirt. So I started digging, using only a knife, a folding saw, and my bare hands. My inspiration was the debris hut, a shelter i know from the wilderness school.
The main structure is made of bent hazel branches, which looks like a huge streamlined basket. This a covered with jute bags, than a thick layer of pressed straw and a thick plastic lining normally used for ponds. All this is covered with dirt.
The entrance is formed by two well-chosen bent branches and around it, I closed the gap with adobe and some embedded glass bottles for light. The door was then closed by a few layers of woolen blankets.
Heat is provided by two small burners using denatured alcohol. It was warm and cosy this first winter. And even without heating, temperatures inside never fell below 7°C (44°F) inside, with -10° (14°F) outside, the warmth from the ground keeping the interior warmer.
In 2018, I added three layers of mud plastering to the inside walls. I dug the floor deeper and added a clay layer with gravel on top, covered by an earthen floor, sealed with linseed oil and wax. A small rocket mass heater now provides heating. With all the thermal mass from the mud, it now takes a little longer to heat up, but then keeps the warmth for more than a day.
The newest addition is a double-glassed door with a wooden frame perfectly fitted to the door shape, providing a lot more light inside when I use the space during the day.
All in all, the experience of building my own shelter, with not much more than my bare hands and what materials I could find in the vicinity alone was worth the effort. I think it is one of the most basic instincts of all living beings to make their own shelter, and we humans are no exception.
–Martin Fuchs
Article in Swiss newspaper (You may need to use an incognito window to get past the web block.)
