Thursday, August 19, 2010. Natural builder Lydia Doleman of Flying Hammer Productions gave us plenty of stories about the urban neighborhood community that’s evolving from two adjoining homes she purchased with friends. And she gave us a tour of the cob studio and recently-completed straw bale home.

When Lydia and a friend bought a Craftsman-style home in a Portland neighborhood, they renovated it  earthen wall surfaces, healthier paints and more. Following permacultural principles, Lydia wanted to keep as many resources on site as possible, like rainwater catchment to keep water in the land rather than diverted into the city sewer system. When she built the cob (clay and straw) studio, she included a living roof so the land taken by the studio is “returned” to growing plants.

Some years ago when an adjoining rental house became available, she contacted the owner and purchased it. She took the fence down between the parcels, and put glass french doors on both house sides facing into the central commons. This “social architecture” was an invitation for residents to interact with one another, evolving into a community that now houses about a dozen people in three homes (see “Fences Down: Creating Community in the City“).

Lydia gave us a tour of the recently-completed third home. It’s architecturally modeled like the others yet far more resource efficient. It has a 500 square foot ground floor with a single kitchen, dining, living room plus an extra room, and 300 square feet in the second story with two bedrooms and bath. The structure is framed like a traditional “stick built” home but boasts thick straw bale insulation, hydroponic heating in the floors, natural cob wall finishes, salvaged wood where possible, and custom-built windows. A metal roof feeds rainwater collectors, and it too has a living roof ready for planting. Solar hot water will be joined by solar electricity soon.

She also gave us a tour of the charming small cob studio. But I’m going to let you wait see it in the video!

Building structures, social structures. Starting with what’s already in place and then…enhancing it, bending it towards shared living, a lighter footprint, sustainability. (www.theflyinghammer.com).

“Wind up, up, up the road to the tippity top of the hill,” read the directions, “and when it flattens out at the top, my house is a hop, skip and a jump away in the young alder woods.”

What magical place were we coming to, and who would write such directions? As we walked through the alder-shaded path, slender trunks curved like a canopy over the pathway, beckoning us in…to Greg Crawford’s enchanting wattle-and-cob tiny house. Right out of Middle Earth. Or right in it.

We taped a conversation in the second-story open-air balcony / loft about Greg’s intuitive architecture. The process of building from green alder uprights stuck in cement-and-stone foundation. Weaving horizontal alder sticks to create undulating walls. Digging clay onsite to mix with straw, and applying the resulting cob to the wooden structure inside and out.

This summer season house has a dark and cozy spacious downstairs den (perhaps like the den Bear hibernates in?). And our favorite, a nest filled with pillows, the perfect soft womb to fall into. Above it, a two-story tower with inset windows of organic and ornate shapes. Ornamentation adorned nooks, chandeliers, candleholders, windows, niches.

Greg advocates building such intuitive, personal, organic structures…to sustain hearts and souls as well as bodies. And to show that with few tools, common sense, and by listening to our body’s innate wisdom, we can create our own sustainable and totally personal homes rather than make ourselves fit into the boxes built by others.

I hope you’ll be as enchanted visiting this magical place in video as we were taping it! Move over, Bilbo!

Friday August 6, 2010. We set out to tape an overview show of Aprovecho Center, and found such richness that we taped enough for three.

Land stewards Tao Orion and Abel Kloster provided background to the center. Aprovecho has been on this 40 acres of land since the early 1980s. The founders’ appropriate technology work, primarily designing and testing rocket stoves for developing countries, spun off perhaps a decade ago. (See my journal “A World of “Rocket” Wood-Burning Cookstoves”). Now the center demonstrates and provides educational opportunities for sustainable, localized, appropriate technology living.

Above the gardens are two community buildings with photovoltaics, solar hot water and sufficient rainwater catchment (stored in a ferro-cement tank) to meet the needs of their workshop guests all year.

Restoration forester Matthew Hall gave us a tour of their “managed ancient forest” (second-growth forest intended never to be cut), pointing out essential elements like snags and down logs which build soil. They use human- and horse-power to harvest logs, which are milled (and some solar kiln-dried) for building materials and fuel.

We joined Jeremy Roth in the steamy hothouse to tape the aquaculture project for raising tilapia fish. Water with fish poop is pumped along the periphery of the hot house where algae and other pond plants are fed by the fish waste. The cleaned water eventually returns to the fish tanks. They’re also experimenting with plants that live entirely in water like water chestnut, and hydroponics (shallow beds of water-covered gravel.) You’ll love the moment when Jeremy jumps into the fish tank and nets a few.

Heather Kalian and Brad Koehn’s green thumbs are creating a garden of edible wild beauty. They’re experimenting with turning the soil as little as possible, companion planting including the vertical dimension (pole beans above kale shading lettuce), three sisters and grains together (winter squash, corn, beans, oats, amaranth, buckwheat).

We taped an entire show with Aprovecho’s sustainable shelter manager Chris Foraker in their community center. This natural building employs primarily materials from on site and many volunteer hands. Their sustainably-harvested forest provided pole trusses, cut lumber, flat-sided poles, and tongue-and-groove for wainscotting. Sand, straw, and clay from their ponds are combined to surface their walls and floors in a warmly organic plaster surface.

Jeremy also highlighted their educational programs introducing sustainability to grade school kids (see where your food comes from!), and working with high school students in their community to gain skills and work opportunities in sustainability trades like solar and energy efficiency.

See what I mean about richness? It’s a place where earth stewards are exploring what local and sustainable can mean. We are all the richer for it.