day one design

Aprovecho Sustainable Shelter Series 2011: Inside Insulation Course

2012-04-08T18:06:01-07:00

Welcome to Aprovecho! This year is the first of an annual offering called the Sustainable Shelter Series. It's an amazing overview of natural construction techniques at a very beautiful place near Cottage Grove, Oregon. I'm here teaching the week-long insulation section of the series. This first picture is of the structure as I arrive to it, a beautiful hybrid timberframe ready for strawbales on the northwall, light clay straw on the east and west and chip-slip infill on the south. Talk about a lot going on in a little playhouse! Bale infill begins the first day Bales make great scaffolding too! starting the mud mix for the light clay straw this is a great screen system for a wheelbarrow, I want one of my own! chinking the bales ramming the straw clay mixing table making slip from the nearby pond's pure clay, what a resource! more mixing! the forms leap-frog up and before you know it, we've got solid walls! reed mats for forms for the chip-slip sections uh-oh, no workshop complete with out a mud fight! one week and a dozen hard workers... and we've got some naturally insulated walls!

Clary Rose Cob Oven

2012-04-06T12:52:22-07:00

Welcome to Clary Rose Farm! A wonderful new permaculture demonstraiton site near Fort Jones, California As per usual, I'm here to get dirty and show a bunch of people how to make a functional oven out of mud and some salvaged materials Laying the insulative layer, old bottles make great air pockets in a bed a slip-coated sawdust. Starting the cob Laying the hearth floor with fire bricks the sand dome form the arched doorway we also build benches into either side of the oven and integrate existing fence posts into the structure straw-clay for insulation sculptural cob holds it in almost to the top! Carrie is going to do decorative earth plaster once the oven is dry. We enjoy pizza the first night!

Raven Oven

2012-04-04T19:25:29-07:00

Welcome to the community of Breitenbush Hotsprings! I'm here leading the construction of an earthen oven with attached benches. We decided to shape the oven as a raven, which has a lot of meaning for many of the members of this community. Patrick has built a beautiful roof structure and stone foundation for the project. The first workshop is focused on building the oven. It's classic cob--all ages get involved! At the next workshop, we build the wings and benches. The wings have an internal structure formed with wire fencing. Here Sara, the lead organizer of this project, is harvesting sand from the creek... This will work great for our plasters too. The next workshop will be focused on painting the raven with an aliz, or clay paint. We are planning to do a design with Pacific Northwest Native American motifs. I'll post the workshop when the date gets set. Until then, enjoy the pizza!

Village Building Convergence 2010

2010-11-11T00:07:39-08:00

Welcome to the Village Building Convergence, a true gem about Portland and one of my personal favorite things about the city. Each year, an organization called City Repair puts on a ten-day festival of community building and place-making, often using natural construction to do so. It's wonderful, 25 sites all across the city welcomed community members to join in playing in the mud while creating beautiful meaningful relationships and simple projects along the way. I was honored to be one of their guest instructors this year and participate in many of the activities throughout the week. A cob bench from a previous year, being wholesomely enjoyed An intersection painting, brings neighbors together in the street and helps slow down traffic with it's thoughtful design. There are many of these throughout Portland, how many have you seen? A cat palace, built last year and led by my dear friend Eva Miller, and this year she's building a Chicken Palace. What lucky animals in the urban place! She also led the renovation of the City's first legal Light Clay-Straw Retrofit. And it came out great! Here's a detail picture of the wall section for all you builder nerds My awesome new friend Fezzo who was my housemate for the week. and his bright red kilt that we dyed together mid-week. This project was my favorite--an outdoor classroom at Madison High School. The timberframe and main cob walls had been built the previous year. Now we are adding strawbale ampitheater style seating and some bamboo and sculptural cob. I have never seen as enthusiastic cobbers as here! What a huge batch! Rachel gets into it Beautiful lime finishes from the prior year Wetting down the top of the wall so that we can add to it this year. An amazing attribute of natural construction, that it is forever mendable and able to be rehydrated and continued. Sebastian works on a bamboo detail. Casey lays out the bale seats. Then the seats are cover with slip and cobbed together, making it very strong. We sculpt a sun at the center point of the top Many, many people are involved with making it happen Across town, at another project site, I lead a plaster workshop. We are applying the final coat of plaster on a cob bench built the previous year. Ellen has a great time finishing the project, she has put a lot of energy into the transformation of her backyard into a food forest sanctuary and community garden. She can't wait to enjoy using the bench! So excited for next year, please check out www.cityrepair.org for more info, and see you there!

Cob Loop-de-Loop!

2010-11-10T23:40:32-08:00

Welcome to the BRING Planet Improvement Center! I'm building a piece for their sculpture park called the Garden of Earthly Delights. It's a totally ground-breaking, never been done before that I know of, cob-adobe hybrid spiraling loop-de-loop... yes, all that and some. the 'before' shot Laying the urbanite foundation with a gravel bed below and reclaimed chimney bricks every 8 feet. Something had to break up the 50' long curved bench. The gently curving part is intended for classroom style seating when BRING wants to host groups to learn about sustainability, salvage and using reclaimed materials. A group of high school students spends their spring break getting muddy and learning about how to build with cob. We finish most of the length of the bench that week. Then, I begin the loop Building up the plynths more cob, even solo finally the bases are ready and I start the adobe arch, using a 5 foot diameter plywood form a new friend, Jessica Gray, helps out making arches is a total blast! More cob, fleshing out the structural adobe arch More builder friends join in to help with the integral roof/bench surface. We're using toilet tank covers to protect the cob. We debate it for a long while and decide to go with a salvaged steel armature to support the overhang of the toilet tank covers. It's totally great working at a salvage warehouse, all materials right on hand! Eva Miller and I trim the form of the loop Max and Fezzo work on the toilet tank extravaganza Each piece is slightly sloped to the rear to drain. We use cementitious mortar to set the porcelin The toilet tank covers follow the form of the bench and spiral upwards we have to get clever about how we will secure them up-side-down It takes all four of us to get them to behave Wired in and temporary strings help out too. Defying gravity is one of my favorite things... Super hero pvc'ers to the rescue for the rafters, another great find at the warehouse the roof for the loop gets framed with these, Max Edelson takes on that project I teach a workshop on earthen plasters and have several wonderful folks join in on the finishing touches Hooray! Ethan Rainwater, the Garden Designer is happy with what we've created. some finished shots, with two coats of linseed oil, this thing looks an awful lot like a chocolate frosted donut... complete with sprinkles! my original sketch/rendering that I presented to get the gig quite like I thought it would be!