Surfer couple Kim Obermeyer and Holly Beck using our book The Barefoot Architect to build an “Eco-friendly Cabaña in Northern Nicaragua.” When you go to this site, check out Holly riding her longboard — she rocks! (It’s on right side, under “Recent Posts,” titled “Longboarding at La Bahia.” She just floats up from paddling to standing position and then shreds. She also runs a women’s surf camp in Nicaragua, Suave Dulce.
https://hipehabitat.com/2011/09/14/designing-an-eco-friendly-cabana-in-northern-nicaragua/
Author and photographer Andy Couturier will discuss his new book profiling people living simple, sustainable, extraordinary lives in rural Japan, A Different Kind of Luxury: Japanese Lessons in Simple Living and Inner Abundance. This book lets readers feel the flavor and texture of the lives of farmers, artists, philosophers, and craftspeople who’ve chosen lives of reduced consumption and increased satisfaction. Andy will read from his book and show slides from these artists’ ways of life.
Thursday, September 8 – 7:00pm, Point Reyes Presbyterian Church, Pt. Reyes Station, Calif.
Read more about Andy Couturier’s book: https://adifferentkindofluxury.blogspot.com/
This morning I got an email from straw bale experts Bill and Athena Steen, who are in Denmark and Finland doing clay plaster workshops. “Friland (Denmark) is a big story, a mortgage free community with lots of experimental and alternative building happening. Too much to write about, but a visit to their website will tell more: https://www.dr.dk/dr2/friland.…”
Plaster carving by Athena and workshop participants
Old house with reed roof in Feldballe, Denmark
More photos of their trip at: https://www.caneloproject.com/clay-plaster-workshop-in-denmark/#more-1545
Gardner Fire Lookout
“Keep your eyes open to spot the Gardner fire lookout as you approach East Peak. Its native stone at first glance blends with the rock of the peak. Use of local materials was a major feature of the ‘park rustic’ style of many CCC projects. You will have an excellent view of the tower from the parking lot at the base of the peak. The park Visitor Center and a wheelchair-accessible picnic area are also located by East Peak.
The 1920th built this tower between 1935 and 1936. It is still an active Marin County Fire Department lookout. As you view the sturdy stone, wood and steel tower perched on the peak, imagine hauling all the materials up either by cable or by hand. That is how the veterans of the 1920th did it. They also built a water system, including the rock pressure pump house that you can see below the peak, and ran electricity and phone lines. According to Marin County Fire Department history, ‘. . . equipped with electricity, hot and cold running water, and telephone, this lookout was acclaimed ‘The Deluxe Lookout Station of California.'”
https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=25060
Thanks to Bob Gagnier
There was an excellent article by Penelope Green in the NYTimes Home section yesterday
on a straw bale builder in the Catskills. Penelope writes:”Originally deployed by late 19th-century homesteaders in the Nebraska plains, straw-bale building techniques, though much refined, have essentially remained the same for the last century: hay bales are sliced into blocks, tucked into a frame and finished in plaster. (You can visit many of the early Nebraskan straw-balers, but not the first documented one, an unplastered one-room schoolhouse, because it was eaten by cows.)
Nobody paid much attention to this hardy Plains vernacular until the early 1970s, when Shelter, the building bible of budding counterculturalists, was first published. Included in its tour of zomes, yurts and treehouses was an essay on the “baled hay” houses of the Plains.”
She’s referring to the photo of a straw bale barn on page 70 of Shelter, BTW, Bill Steen, who co-authored the best seller The Straw Bale House in 1994 with his wife Athena and David A. Bainbridge, told me that this photo was what got him started with straw bale in the first place.
Click here for article: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/garden/in-the-catskills-building-stone-by-stone-bale-by-bale.html?hpw
Photo by Raeanne Giovanni-Inoue for The New York Times
“This artistic and colorful fence is in the arts district in Silver City, New Mexico. Part of the fence appears to be from an old stamped metal ceiling.…”
This is a great blog. I love the stuff shown in this series of posts: https://altbuildblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-on-fences.html#more
This is a simple small book on Brian “Ziggy” Liloia’s construction of a cob cottage at an ecovillage in northeast Missouri. This is a Blurb book, a way anyone can produce high-quality color books. It’s expensive for such a small book, but cheap for the fact that they are printed one at a time.
Ziggy’s cottage is really nice, and I recommend the book to anyone contemplating a cob cottage. (It’s also one of the buildings featured in our book on tiny homes.)
Note: if you use the promo code “NEWBLURB”, the book is 20% off.
https://small-scale.net/yearofmud/
Master natural materials builder SunRay Kelley and his partner Bonnie have just returned from a 6000 mile trip to Mexico in their in-process solar powered biodiesel Toyota camper (see https://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=10883512 for stuff on my blog about SunRay).
SunRay’s looking for a project. The last one he did was a beautiful little sculptural timber-cob studio in Northern California, which I photographed for a feature in our forthcoming tiny houses book. He brought all the wall and roof sheathing with him, cut and milled on his Washington property, then got posts and beams in the local woods. He told me a few days ago that things were slow in Washington and he was looking for a project. He’s done projects as far away from home as New York state and Mexico.
I couldn’t recommend anyone more highly. His structures utilize almost all natural materials in ingenious ways, are beautiful, and finely crafted. Call 360-333-0364 or email Bonnie at sunray@sunraykelley.com.
“The five casitas and lodge were built of adobe in the last few years by David and Jennifer MacKay.”
Pictures of the El Pedregal Nature Lodge and Retreat Center, which is situated on a twenty acre oasis in the town of Alamos, Sonora, Mexico, appearing on Alt. Build Blog.
I stayed here a few years ago. It’s a wonderful place in a beautiful old Mexican town in the mountains.
Lots of stuff to check out on this blog.
Surfer couple Kim Obermeyer and Holly Beck using our book The Barefoot Architect to build an “Eco-friendly Cabaña in Northern Nicaragua.” When you go to this site, check out Holly riding her longboard — she rocks! (It’s on right side, under “Recent Posts,” titled “Longboarding at La Bahia.” She just floats up from paddling to standing position and then shreds. She also runs a women’s surf camp in Nicaragua, Suave Dulce.
