Eco building, Garden, Permaculture design

Sunset cobwebs

March 5, 2014 3 Comments

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A dream in coloured bottles.

Every work day I walk through EVE. She is Gaudi reborn in earthship, not just in her lovely sinuous curves and embellishment, but because she has stood unfinished for years. There is something beautiful about her abandoned state, but sad too.

I have moved onto building a can and glass bottle retaining wall for the Simple Survival so I thought it would be nice to showcase the most beautiful use of those materials I have seen on the Sustainable Testing Site. EVE stands for Earthship Village Ecologies, an earthship geared towards housing a community rather than an individual or family. An idyllic world where Academy students grow food in a massive greenhouse on her southern face, joining the old world of the original earthship offices to the east to the classroom to the west. It’s a beautiful vision if they can pull it off, but at the moment other projects have diverted attention, money has been spent elsewhere, she is waiting.

Eco building, Permaculture design, Travel

Castle & Pyramid

March 3, 2014 4 Comments

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where the wild things are

The weekend rolled around and we felt like we’d earned it. Relying on the kindness of our truck driving Towers neighbour Sam, we headed into town. The goal was grocery shopping with an underlying agenda of nachos and margaritas at the Taos Inn. While the boys checked out the local fly fishing shop I was greeted by an automated and frighteningly cheery “Good Morning” from the thrift shop door. It was a Johnson street worthy secondhand shop with the added bonus of a ski section. I bought the luxury of a second pair of pants, my only other pair had started giving out clouds of cement dust when I walked, not ideal.

Then we were counting speed bumps on the way to a BBQ at the Castle. It really was more of a large scale tin can, but the inside was awesome, like a kind of large scale cubby house. From the roof we could see the Mesa stretched out until it hit mountains on all sides, below geese were causing a ruckus in the same pen as a world weary rooster, who just looked with a “tell me about it” shrug of his feathers.

Mojitos, a sunken fireplace and beams of light on an 80s interior. It had the same signs we had come to associate with earthship, brilliant ideas then a sudden loss of interest, things never quite finished because another idea, another building takes over. This building and those surrounding were the genesis of an ADD way of building. It was fun, unconventional and innovative, but the people staying in the Pods didn’t have running water for two days and the girls in the castle were freezing at night.

While the castle interns organised dinner, we wandered outside, the sun was gone but the light still brushed the plains pale with the pyramid looming alien ahead. It wasn’t “the pyramid” of Mike Reynold’s moonlight excursions in the coffin, but there was something otherworldly about it. this might have been in part due to the interns ensconced in its mezzanine tip beatboxing, the echoes reverberating down the rickety ladder and out into the cool night air.

After dinner a circle of five braved the night chill and played hot coals around the fire. Three catching and passing and under strict instructions from Dylan the two of us dodging to protect out pump jackets. Then later after a good natured scrabble at the door, with Vera and Melissa not wanting anyone to leave we were back in the car counting speed bumps and singing at the top of our lungs to the hits of the 90s.

Eco building, Permaculture design, Travel

The Towers

March 2, 2014 6 Comments

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This is where we live

Another day of slabbing, carpentry and bottle wall cleaning. Enrique and I finally got into a sweet rhythm doing what had talen us two days in half a day on the second door. By clean-up time I could still have gone on for hours, and that’s how I knew it was time to try something new. Timber and tools were familiar friends, so it was time to learn a knew skill.

After dinner the interns in walking distance filtered into our humble abode. When we first realised we were staying here Sam and I, perfect stranger, hi-fived one another, it was nice. An experiment in a double storey city dwelling it had radiant slab heating, a double height courtyard and most importantly running water which we were told people in “the Pods” lacked. Ground floor and first both had a bedroom/kitchen and after some tossing of furniture between the levels a little table each. The four of us had leisurely lunches together being only a minute from site and we could here Jason strumming his guitar upstairs most night.

Most importantly there is a double height cistern system that was running low after a dry spell. Important because when a water delivery truck showed up they weren’t familiar with the system. Water began spilling across our kitchen floor and it was then with mop in hand that I got my first and perhaps only encounter with the great man of mystery Michel Reynolds. His first words to me were something like “we F@#$ed up”, then they did some tinkering and the tide receded.

Now packed with interns and instruments, the place hummed with random chords. Bris tried to teach us the Saw, but I could never quite get that sweet spot on the S curve. People were shy, but some nice melodies kept floating to the surface, fell to pieces in disharmony then rose up anew. I was beginning to like this place and these people a lot, and was almost missing them already knowing we’d only have a few weeks together.

Eco building, Permaculture design, Travel

Let the concrete pour

March 1, 2014 1 Comment

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From the floor up

It takes someone pretty talented to be able to take beautiful photos of a concrete pour whilst standing on a ladder trying to get window trimming done. That person is not me, so if you like pretty more than practical forgive me my shortcomings and tune in tomorrow for some shiny. Earthship biotecture do their slabs in an interesting way with timber framing dividing it up into lots of little pours and the timber formwork itself becoming expansion joints. It means that you only have to do a few pours at a time, then when they are cured move on to the ones adjacent. Its fiddly, but no more so than having to do an awkward large pour and reach all the edges I guess. Its pretty with its red oiled wood a counterpoint to the greenish tint of their iron stain. If you want to be more sustainable you could do the same with a mud floor.

The formwork is leveled, and “porcupined” with screws so that the sides grip the concrete. Reinforcing mesh is cut to size and when the concrete is poured it is lifted up somewhere near the centre to give tensile strength. The concrete is hard troweled, timber sanded and stained, then the concrete is stained after it is cured for a few days.

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Meanwhile outside the wind had picked up, the day before had been all sunshine and we were stripping of jackets in the heat. Today was freezing. Jerry and Dan were constructing bottle wall retaining walls, as simple as it gets without even cutting the bottles and making them into bricks. Through the pipe we could hear jack hammering all day, Dylan and Co were searching for a air duct that may or my not be there but was definitely at least 5 feet down in soil so frozen they at first they thought it was concrete. Enrique and I agreed we definitely had a pretty sweet deal with the indoor trimming.

See you tomorrow for some pretty.