See: http://www.asl.uni-kassel.de/~feb/Welcome_e.html

I’m sure there are flaws with this idea, and that the can/plastic idea would not last very long in sun/rain exposure… but what do you think?

If somebody could make an article for this site about the grate earth building traditions of Romania, that 100 years ago made up 85 % of all building in this lovely but ravaged country, creating villages with the full meaning of the quality without a name, defined by Alexander in The Timeless Way of Building, it should cheer my hearth.

Also such an article could fill romanians with pride of their past, and give hope to so many poor people now dreaming about living in a “modern” concrete building. Realizing that they can build the true quality of life right out of their ground. To see that their dream about the oil intensive comfort zone of the western world and EU is a false dream. That they can make something much better, a life zone, provided by Mother Earth, guided by Permaculture.

@Øyvind Holmstad: Thanks for the link! Interesting stuff

@Everyone else: I don’t have much to add to the discussion, but again: very interesting stuff, thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Has anyone here read The Barefoot Architect? It’s basically “my own first eco-village” in book-form, with very clear pictures, and just about every possible topic covered.

I’m really enjoying the video you put up before on david sheen’s web site. I’m still watching it.

I agree with what you are saying regarding change. I can not speak for Geoff, but I do wonder if his statement around ten years is based in any way on a predictive outlook to when the pressures from the beginning of the end of hydrogen based economies will happen.

I’ve talked to a few owner-builders in the area just around the financial institutional pressures and they only got their finances arranged with traditional lenders by purchasing as investment to get the loan and then built later after the loan was in place.

There is always a conformity pressure in society, even in the smaller villages. The councils are worried about fitting in with a preset look and feel and not deviating too much as they have to worry about their own property values although they don’t directly state so. Conformity breeds perceived security and sense of identity so I can understand how these regulations develop.

Its just a bit of a shame you have to go very rural to gain a sense of freedom from people telling you what to do when it comes to choices surrounding living structures and land use in general.

Takk

Peter

I’m sorry to tell this situation is the same in all westernized countries, where we suffer so deeply from the mechanistic idea of order, this idea that is the contrary of permaculture and the nature of order:

http://permaculture.org.au/2010/02/04/letters-from-sri-lanka-sarvodaya-builds-sri-lankas-first-eco-village/#comments

I heard in the radio interwiev with Geoff Lawton posted above that he is very positive for a change to Permaculture in mainstream culture within ten years. I hope and pray he is right, but I also consider that Christopher Alexander is not this optimistic:

“Living process is by nature morphogenetic. That means a living process acts, in every facet, as a whole, and in all its aspects, is aimed at creating POSITIV SPACE, is aimed at making form coherent. A living process is oriented in its entirety, towards the creation of wholes.

The present-day piecemeal and fragmented processes of our society, are not oriented towards creating wholes. They are highly organized, yes. But they are not oriented, in their substance, towards the creation of living wholes. They are oriented coherently, but towards making money, or creating power…other matters entirely.

How then can this too-rigidly coherent machine gradually be changed? Is it possible for a merely piecemeal process, grafted into the existing fragmented system, to change it gradually towards a morphogenetic process, much more like the idealized living process I have defined earlier? If that is so, then we may face even more difficult hurdles, before we can succeed.

Once again, we are led to the realization that a piecemeal modification of society, along with the simple lines envisaged in chapter 18, will not be powerful enough to work. It will not work because the force and integration of present life-destroying process is so massive, and so thoroughly organized. What we became used to in the 20th century as the process of development, prevented people from acting according to their feelings, still to this day prevents people from acting according to their feelings, still to this day prevents people from shaping the environment in a way that is appropriate according to the global nature of the whole – and prevents the successful evolution, as unfolding would suggest, of buildings and landscape.

Thus the 20th-century process interrupts the process of paying attention to wholeness, the unfolding of wholeness, and the process of shaping the surface of the Earth correctly. At the same time it also robs people from the simple joy of acting appropriately, in a way that is fulfilling.

The connection between the two – the rise of developers and the loss of feeling – is not accidental. It may seem ridiculous to say that the world will be improved – in its organization – if people are able to act, at every scale, according to their feeling. But it is the WHOLE that is being damaged by the loss of feeling. By not allowing people to act according to the global feeling of the situation, that means that each of the prevailing processes – whether they have to do with development, or land purchase, or transportation planning, or banking, or speculation, or construction-contract administration – they all, in their present form, have the capacity to damage feeling and therefore to fly in the face of the interests of the global whole.

Worst of all, perhaps, is the fact that the process which exist – which we now take for granted – in many cases virtually outlaw living process, make living process fundamentally and practically impossible, impossible even to imagine, since the ground rules of the processes we know today have driven them out so far.”

The Process of Creating Life, by Christopher Alexander, page 524 – 525.

I also found the entire banking and finance structure here compared to the USA tries its hardest to lock you into land and house packages by a licensed builder at fixed cost and conventional structures. It is not an owner-builder friendly environment in the finance markets, nor insurance.

I wonder if its different up north in NSW in rural areas doing earth friendly construction of dwellings. I have to sit back and laugh sometimes at the regulations here, as if timbre itself was put through the building requirements as a material, it would most likely fail. I am going recycled steel frame for rapid construction time and going owner-builder but its definitely not my first choice or make me the happiest but I’m dealing with Palerang Council down here in the southern tablelands area and have to put up until I am in a position to move.

Cheers,
Peter

http://www.davidsheen.com/firstearth/english/

A couple years ago I attended a lecture at the University of Minn. architecture school on affordable housing in the third world. One of the groups involved was working on simple earthquake resistant designs. They were working on reconstruction of housing in Bam, Iran.